LAMBERT, John (1619-84), of Calton, Kirkby Malham, Yorks., and Wimbledon, Surr.

Lambert was and remains one of the most enigmatic figures of the civil-war era – his complex personality reflected in his diverse tastes and accomplishments, which embraced those of the art-collector, horticulturalist, soldier and constitutional theorist. A man of ‘unbounded mind’, or as Bulstrode Whitelocke* put it, ‘of a subtle and working brain’, he developed a highly nuanced and idiosyncratic political philosophy that confounded contemporaries as much as it does modern historians.81The Case of Colonel John Lambert, Prisoner in the Tower of London (1661), 1; Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 163. The salient details of his background and career have now been established.82W. H. Dawson, Cromwell’s Understudy (1938); Farr, Lambert. But reconstructing his intellectual life has proved more problematic – partly because relatively little of his personal correspondence has survived; and those letters that we do have are often unrevealing of his motives and thought processes. Yet there is one very obvious fact that had a bearing on his political outlook, and that was his age at the outbreak of civil war. Born in 1619, he was almost 20 years the junior of Oliver Cromwell* and many other leading parliamentarians – who, on average, were ten or more years older than their royalist counterparts – and belonged to a generation that did not share their instinctive reverence for Parliament. In fact, by 1648, Lambert seems to have distrusted that institution almost as much as the royalists and Levellers did, if for different reasons. The need to fetter the ‘boundless ... arbitrary power’ of Parliaments while not emasculating the executive was a central feature of his political thought from the late 1640s and did much to shape his career at both Westminster and Whitehall.83Burton’s Diary, i. 281-2.

Background and early career

Lambert belonged to a minor gentry family that had settled at Calton Hall in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the 1530s.84Morkill, Kirkby Malhamdale, 140; Farr, Lambert, 8-10. Situated close to the border with Lancashire and Westmorland, Calton lay in that region of the Pennines dominated by the Cliffords, earls of Cumberland, with whom the Lamberts and their gentry friends the Listers of Thornton in Craven established close links.85Infra, ‘Sir William Lister’; Farr, Lambert, 8, 10. An anonymous pamphleteer, writing shortly after the Restoration, claimed that Lambert’s father, Josias Lambert, had been ‘much respected by one of the honourablest families in that part of England’ – almost certainly a reference to the Cliffords – and that John Lambert, ‘by a powerful, timely intervening’ during the civil wars, had preserved them from ruin and thereby discharged his family’s obligations to that ‘noble acquaintance’.86The Case of Colonel John Lambert, 2-3.

The first three generations of the Lamberts of Calton spelt their surname ‘Lambart’, as did Lambert’s wife Frances and indeed Lambert himself until the mid-1640s, when he adopted the form more familiar to modern scholars.87Add. 15858, f. 47; Add. 21426, f. 177; Harl. 7001, f. 180; Sl. 1517, ff. 37, 39; Leeds Univ. Lib. MD335/1/1/6/8/8; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 94, 95; Morkill, Kirkby Malhamdale, 157. Josias Lambert ranked sufficiently highly to secure a place on West Riding bench.88Morkill, Kirkby Malhamdale, 155. However, a combination of financial mismanagement and mishap had led to a severe downturn in the family’s fortunes by the 1620s.89Farr, Lambert, 11-13. When he died in 1632, Josias left debts of £1,200 and an estate either encumbered with mortgages and annuities or leased on long and disadvantageous terms. The only property left in the possession of his widow was Calton Hall and adjoining lands, which were worth no more than £60 a year.90WARD5/48, bdle. L-R; WARD5/49, bdle. L-O; WARD9/218, f. 271; C142/486/120.

A ‘tender and sickly’ child, Lambert was still a minor when Josias died, and his mother was required to purchase (for £200) his wardship from the crown.91WARD5/49, bdle. L-O; WARD9/218, f. 271; WARD9/163, f. 35v. In the event of his death, Josias had assigned the care of his son’s education to his widow and a group of his kinsmen headed by Lambert’s future father-in-law Sir William Lister*.92Morkill, Kirkby Malhamdale, 155-6; Farr, Lambert,13. It has been speculated that Lambert attended Kirkby Malhamdale school under the mastership of the godly minister Nicholas Walton, and it is almost certain that he was the John Lambert who was admitted to Trinity, Cambridge in 1636, along with two of Lister’s sons, Christopher* and Henry.93Farr, Lambert, 13-15. Lambert’s tutor at Trinity was another godly minister, Henry Hall.94Farr, ‘Education of Major-General John Lambert’, 11-14. If, as Whitelocke claimed, Lambert also attended one of the inns of court, then it was probably Gray’s Inn, where Christopher Lister and several more of Lambert’s kinsmen were admitted during the later 1630s.95Infra, ‘Christopher Lister’; Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 163; Farr, ‘Education of Major-General John Lambert’, 14-15.

As Sir William Lister’s protégé, Lambert was belonged to a network of Yorkshire gentry that included Henry Belasyse*, John Belasyse*, Sir Ferdinando Fairfax* and his son Thomas Fairfax* – the future commander of the New Model army. According to one authority, this network ‘formed an alignment ... unsympathetic to the president of the [council of the] north’, Viscount Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford).96Farr, Lambert, 18-19. This was certainly true of the Belasyses.97Infra, ‘Henry Belasyse’. However, until the second bishops’ war, Lister and the Fairfaxes were conformable to the lord president’s authority in the north and were generally on amicable terms with Wentworth himself. Lambert was a member of a foot company in the West Riding trained bands by the late 1630s and, as such, may have served under Lister or the Fairfaxes during the bishops’ wars.98Add. 40132, f. 51v; Farr, Lambert, 23. Later evidence would certainly suggest that he shared Wentworth’s and the Fairfaxes’s jaundiced view of Scottish claims to a legitimate interest in English affairs. To complicate this picture still further, Lambert’s network during the 1630s straddled a range of devotional and ecclesiological preferences. Sir William Lister apparently favoured further reformation in religion, the firmly Calvinist Sir Ferdinando Fairfax was ‘zealous for the liturgy’ of the Church of England, while the Belasyses were church-papists.99Supra, ‘Henry Belasyse’; ‘Sir Ferdinando Fairfax’; infra, ‘Sir William Lister’.

In the two years between the king’s defeat by the Scots at Newburn in August 1640 and the outbreak of civil war, the gentry network of which Lambert was a part disintegrated – the majority emerging as prominent members of the Yorkshire parliamentarian interest; the Belasyses siding with the king. Lambert seems to have taken his lead from Lister and the Fairfaxes, and on 12 May 1642, he joined them in a letter from the county’s proto-parliamentarian group to the king, asking him to put his trust in the two Houses and to forbear raising any ‘extraordinary’ guard.100A Letter from the ... Committees of the Commons ... at Yorke (1642), 8 (E.148.4). He signed another petition to the king from this same group on 6 June, complaining about Charles’s abandoning Parliament and drawing together the county’s trained bands – ‘illegally’ as the petitioners conceived it.101PA, Main Pprs. 6 June 1642, ff. 84-5. It is also probable that he joined Lister, the Fairfaxes and other Yorkshire parliamentarians in their address to the Commons late in August, protesting against the issuing of the commission of array at the county’s summer assizes.102Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 649; Farr, Lambert, 26. Within a few months of this address, Lambert had taken a commission in Sir Ferdinando (now 2nd Baron) Fairfax’s northern parliamentarian army and had garrisoned Lister’s house at Thornton-in-Craven to prevent incursions by the Lancashire royalists.103Farr, Lambert, 31; Jones, ‘War in north’, 388.

What motivated Lambert to take up arms for Parliament is perhaps a harder question than it might seem in view of his intimacy with the godly Lister and the Fairfaxes. Speaking in Parliament in 1659, he implied that he had been among the ‘honest, sober, grave people [in 1642] that groaned under oppressions, thirsted after grace, the Reformed [i.e. Calvinist] party of the nation ...’, and he contrasted this group with the ‘papists, prelates and ... debauched people’ who had sided with the king.104Burton’s Diary, iii. 187. Petitioning the crown in 1660, however, he explained his war-time allegiance in less overtly religious terms, insisting that he had fought for the defence of the king, the laws and liberties of the subject, the true reformed Protestant religion and the privileges of Parliament, conceiving himself obliged ‘in duty, honour and conscience to adhere faithfully to its commands’.105SP29/1/84, f. 160. To one contemporary at least, the mottoes on Lambert’s colours – ‘pro rege et veritate’ (for king and truth) and ‘ut servat incolumem’ (let Him preserve us unharmed) – suggested that their bearer ‘wished to speak no ill to monarchy’.106Add. 5247, ff. 59v, 93v; H. Estienne [trans. T. Blount], The Art of Making Devises (1650), sig. M2a.

War in the north, 1642-6

Lambert was second only to Sir Thomas Fairfax as the northern army’s most talented field commander. His martial prowess is all the more remarkable given his ‘sickly’ childhood and his lack of training and experience as an officer. And yet he had proved so successful in the field that by the spring of 1643 that Lord Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) made him a colonel of foot – this when Lambert was a mere 23 years old and when the average age of parliamentarian colonels in Yorkshire was 33. By the time he had won Sir Thomas’s plaudits for his conduct at the battle of Nantwich early in 1644, he also commanded a regiment of horse.107Farr, Lambert, 32, 34, 44; Jones, ‘War in north’, 388. Having returned to the West Riding by early 1644, he twice defeated numerically superior royalist forces under his kinsman by marriage John Belasyse.108P. R. Newman, ‘The defeat of John Belasyse: civil war in Yorks. Jan.-Apr. 1644’, Yorks. Arch. Jnl. lii. 123-33. These victories paved the way for the routing of Belasyse’s army by the Fairfaxes at Selby in April, which, in turn, led directly to the siege of York and, indirectly, to the victory at Marston Moor, when Sir Thomas Fairfax’s and Lambert’s horse on the parliamentarian right wing, combining with Cromwell and the Scottish commander David Leslie on the left, were instrumental in winning the day for Parliament.109Farr, Lambert, 37.

Wounded in an engagement in the West Riding in the autumn of 1644, Lambert went to London to recuperate.110Farr, Lambert, 37, 46; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 123. During his brief stay in the capital, he gave evidence against Sir John Hotham* at the latter’s trial and wrote several letters to Sir Thomas Fairfax (about the Self-Denying Ordinance and other developments at Westminster) in terms that suggest an ongoing correspondence between the two men.111Sl. 1519, ff. 27, 39; Harl. 7001, f. 180; Mercurius Civicus no. 80 (28 Nov.-5 Dec. 1644), 736 (E.21.2); Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 94-5, Farr, Lambert, 46-7. He returned to the war in the north early in 1645, but by November of that year he and his regiment of horse had effectively been incorporated into the New Model army – further testament to his military talent and to his intimacy with Fairfax, the army’s commander.112Add. 72437, f. 119v; The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 89 (21-8 Jan. 1645), 712 (E.26.7); no. 105 (17-24 June 1645), 842 (E2.89.3); The Moderate Intelligencer no. 38 (13-20 Nov. 1645), 198 (E.309.25); Farr, Lambert, 38-9, 47.

Lambert was formally admitted to the New Model early in 1646, when he was appointed colonel of a foot regiment in place of Edward Montagu II*, who had resigned his commission.113Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 398. He played an important part in the New Model’s western campaign from the winter of 1645-6 and was involved in the negotiations for the surrender of Exeter.114Farr, Lambert, 39. Fairfax demonstrated his great trust in Lambert by appointing him to the ‘select council’ that managed the siege of Oxford and negotiated its surrender and then by installing him as the city’s governor – a politically sensitive position – with Colonel Richard Ingoldsby* and another officer as his deputies.115Whitelocke, Diary, 186, 187; Farr, Lambert, 39-40. Lambert had thus emerged by the summer of 1646 as one of the grandees of the New Model army.

Army grandee, 1647

Lambert was at the heart of the New Model’s defiance of the Westminster Presbyterians in the spring and summer of 1647. Having been elected one of the army’s spokesmen, he took the lead in questioning the parliamentary commissioners in Saffron Walden church on 15 April as to who would command the New Model in Ireland and Parliament’s intentions regarding redress of the soldiers’ material grievances over indemnity and arrears of pay.116Clarke Pprs. i. 6-7; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 45; Farr, Lambert, 48. It has been suggested, plausibly, that Lambert condoned the publication a few days later of the radical army tract A New Found Stratagem, which perceived a design by ‘a company of false, traitorous and deceitful men in both Houses of Parliament [the Presbyterian grandees] and of proud, covetous priests’ to destroy the army and enslave the people.117A New Found Stratagem Framed in the Old Forge of Machivilisme (1647), 9 (E.384.11); Farr, Lambert, 48-9; M. P. Mahony, ‘The Presbyterian party in the Long Parliament, 2 July 1644-3 June 1647’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1973), 389. When Lambert’s regiment drew up its list of grievances early in May – a process in which Lambert played a prominent role – there was one item that did not feature on any other regimental return: the complaint that ‘the ministers in their public labour by all means do make us odious to the kingdom’, both in sermons and ‘many scandalous books’.118Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XLI, ff. 123-5; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 83; Farr, Lambert, 50. These several references to ‘covetous priests’ and ‘scandalous’ ministers are perhaps the first signs that Lambert had developed a sceptical attitude towards the professional, tithe-maintained ministry. His leading role in the army’s defiance of Parliament that spring aroused the anger and suspicion of Presbyterian officers – in particular, Colonel Thomas Sheffield, Fairfax’s uncle, with whom Lambert and Colonel Edward Whalley* clashed at an officers’ meeting on 15 May.119Clarke Pprs. i. 36-8, 42-3, 48, 49-50; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 87-9; Farr, Lambert, 51-2. Lambert tried to justify his conduct to Fairfax the next day, explaining that as Sheffield and his allies had agreed to serve in Ireland they had been excluded from ‘our private debates’. But he conceded that ‘betwixt them [the Presbyterian officers] and [us] is something past of heat and animosity’.120Clarke Pprs. i. 80-2. It would have come as no surprise to Lambert that his own regiment was among those that Parliament earmarked late in May for disbandment.121Severall Votes of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament (1647), 2 (E.390.12).

With Cornet George Joyce’s seizure of the king on 1 June 1647, the Presbyterian ascendancy at Westminster collapsed, and the army’s political objectives broadened to include the negotiation of a general settlement of the kingdom. Lambert was again at the centre of the army’s proceedings during this new phase of its political evolution, both as a member of its various executive councils and in drafting its numerous manifestos of June and July.122Clarke Pprs. i. 148-9, 151, 176, 183; LJ ix. 257b, 312a; Farr, Lambert, 55, 56, 57. That the army had a larger design in hand than simply the redress of its grievances or the removal of its enemies at Westminster is clear from its Remonstrance of 23 June, in which it declared that there could be no firm and lasting peace ‘without a due consideration of provision for the rights, quiet and immunity of his Majesty, his royal family and his late partakers [i.e. the royalist party]’.123Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 142. In fact, by July the army and Independent grandees were preparing the ground for a treaty with the king – ‘that’s the main of our business’ declared Cromwell – and the task of drafting the terms for this settlement was entrusted to Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton* and Lambert.124Clarke Pprs. i. 184, 197, 212; Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 162-3; Farr, Lambert, 57.

Ireton and Lambert were in many ways a natural choice for the delicate assignment of drafting what would become the Heads of Proposals. Not only had they worked together before, negotiating the surrenders of Truro, Exeter and Oxford, but they were also effectively the protégés of the army’s two most powerful figures, Fairfax and Cromwell.125Farr, Lambert, 60. In addition, Lambert was well known to one of the king’s advisers in the treaty negotiations, Sir John Berkeley*, the former royalist governor of Exeter.126J. Berkeley, Mems. (1699), 6-7. There is strong evidence that Ireton and Lambert performed their task in consultation with the army’s allies at Westminster as well as with Berkeley and the other royalists who were attending the king, of whom the most influential was James Stuart, 1st duke of Richmond.127Bodl. Clarendon 29, ff. 265r-v; Surr. Hist. Centre, Nicholas pprs. G85/5/2/29; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 152; J.S.A. Adamson, ‘The English nobility and the projected settlement of 1647’, HJ xxx. 568, 579, 586-7. It was probably no coincidence that the Heads of Proposals appear to have reiterated and developed those that Cromwell, Sir Henry Vane II* and Richmond had reportedly offered to Charles in September 1646, promising to restore him to ‘the full execution of his regal authority’ and the establishment of a ‘moderated episcopacy’.128NAS, GD 406/1/2044; Hamilton Pprs. ed. Gardiner, 115; Col. Joseph Bampfield’s Apology ed. J. Loftis, P.H. Hardacre (1993), 48-9.

The Heads of Proposals were exceptionally generous to the king in that they allowed him control of the militia and nomination of his councillors after ten years and left room for the establishment of a moderated (non-coercive) episcopacy. Significantly, the Heads also proposed rewarding those royalists who had repudiated the Presbyterians’ design to bring in the Scots. Almost no mention was made of Scotland, which was to be left to its own devices. The war against the Irish rebels was to be carried on exclusively by the English Parliament. Perhaps most revealing of all are the Heads’ provisions for a ‘council of state’ to supervise the kingdom’s armed forces.129Constitutional Docs. of the Puritan Revolution ed. S.R. Gardiner (1906), 316-26. The council’s powers in relation to Parliament were left largely undefined, but it was clearly envisaged as a powerful body in its own right.130Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 163. Lambert’s willingness to defy Parliament in 1647 may reflect not only his belief in the justness of the army’s cause, but also a loss of faith in parliamentary authority itself. The Heads may represent his first attempt to translate his distrust of Parliament into constitutional form.

War in the north, 1647-9

Lambert’s contribution to the army’s counsels was cut short in mid-July 1647, when Fairfax dispatched him into Yorkshire to replace Sednham Poynts as commander of the Northern Association army.131Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 372. Poynts, a Presbyterian, had been arrested and imprisoned by his own troops – probably on the well-founded suspicion that the Presbyterian grandees were planning to use his army as a counterweight to the New Model. Lambert was again a natural choice for this appointment. He was a Yorkshireman, a veteran of the northern war and had close links not only with Fairfax but also some of the ‘agitators’ who had led the mutiny against Poynts.132Farr, Lambert, 64-5. Nevertheless, he was given a frosty reception by the soldiery, who would have preferred a commander of their own choosing. He was required to give assurances that he had been sent down ‘not of his own seeking or for private interests’ but to promote ‘the unanimity of the army for the settling the kingdom’, before he received the soldiers’ approbation.133Add. 18979, f. 252; Perfect Diurnall no. 212 (16-23 Aug. 1647), 1701-2 (E.518.21); Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 196-7; Farr, Lambert, 65-6.

Within a few months of taking command of the Northern Brigade, as it became known, Lambert had established a council of war to oversee its maintenance and to smooth relations with the local population.134York Minster Lib. BB53; Farr, Lambert, 66. By skilful deployment of his forces he was able to contain royalist incursions and uprisings in Westmorland and Yorkshire during the second civil war. But the Northern Brigade was not powerful enough to prevent the Scottish Engagers, under James Hamilton, 1st duke of Hamilton, from invading England in July.135I. Gentles, The New Model Army, 259-60; Farr, Lambert, 40-2. Lambert’s letter to Hamilton of 8 July – a masterly, if disingenuous, apologia for the English Parliament’s proceedings – is again evidence of his subtle political understanding.136LJ x. 378b. After their crushing victory over Hamilton at the battle of Preston in August, Cromwell and Lambert led a flying column into Scotland to secure the Kirk party against the Engagers. If the letter written by ‘J. L.’ from Mordington, in Berwickshire, on 27 September was indeed the work of Lambert, as at least one authority has argued, then he took a strongly apocalyptic and uncharacteristically naive view of the seeming congruence of interest between the godly peoples of the two kingdoms.

I am much persuaded that the Lord hath a glorious work in Scotland as well as in England. The interest of the godly people in Scotland, as to the civil [government], was once different from that of the godly people in England, or at least acted as it had been different. But now the Lord hath been pleased so to order the affairs of that kingdom as that the interest of the godly people there is become the same with ours in England, and they and we must act upon the same grounds and principles. And I am persuaded that so much of their power as the princes of the earth have lent to the support of that Man of Sin, God hath and will suddenly utterly break and destroy.137Good News from Scotland (1648), 6-7 (E.465.34); Clarke Pprs. ii. pp. xxiv-xxv.

His reference to ‘that Man of Sin’ is also revealing of his opinion of Charles I at the end of the second civil war. Cromwell stayed in Scotland for only a few weeks before returning to England, leaving Lambert and several regiments in Edinburgh to prop up the Kirk party. Lambert remained in Scotland until early December, when he was assigned overall command in northern England and the unenviable task of conducting the siege of Pontefract Castle, which was to drag on for another four months.138Gentles, New Model Army, 284; Farr, Lambert, 43-4, 68.

Although named as one of the king’s judges, Lambert remained in the north throughout the winter of 1648-9 and therefore had no hand in either Charles’s trial or execution. As a prisoner in the Tower in 1660, he claimed that he had declared his dislike ‘of the proceedings in anno 1648 relating to the first change of the government by king, Lords and Commons and was for that reason ... commanded to attend his military charge at a great distance from London’.139SP29/1/84, f. 160. Certainly his silence on proceedings at Westminster during January 1649 – which his latest biographer has interpreted as a calculated policy of keeping his options open – has raised doubts about his enthusiasm for the turn of events after Pride’s Purge.140Gentles, New Model Army, 311; Farr, Lambert, 70-2. There can be no question that Lambert endorsed the army’s Remonstrance of November 1648 – which effectively sanctioned both a purge of Parliament and some kind of formal reckoning with the king – and made a concerted effort to persuade his officers to do likewise.141Add. 36996, f. 141; York Minster Lib. BB53, pp. 32-40; Clarke Pprs. ii. 70; A Declaration of the Officers Belonging to the Brigade of Col. John Lambert (1648, E.477.10); Farr, Lambert, 68-70. Yet it is interesting that Thomas Margetts*, judge-advocate to the Northern Brigade, felt it necessary to rebut doubts as to Lambert’s ‘fidelity and integrity to the public cause of the kingdom, as I hear he hath been a little too much spoken of in that sense’.142Clarke Pprs. ii. 70. Moreover, the evidence that Lambert approved of the actual trial proceedings or the regicide is largely circumstantial. He apparently received regular, and approving, reports of the trial from his and the Northern Brigade’s man-of-business in London, Captain Adam Baynes*.143Add. 21427, f. 40. And he continued to favour officers under his command who had welcomed the king’s execution. But the suspicion remains that he was far more comfortable with the use of violence against Parliament than against the person of the king, and that when it came to regicide he was closer to Fairfax than to Ireton and Cromwell. If Lambert did entertain misgivings about the king’s execution, they did not prevent him making extensive purchases of former crown lands in the coming years. The Rump applied a sweetener of its own upon the surrender of Pontefract Castle in March 1649, voting to settle sequestered lands worth £300 a year on him ‘in respect of his many great and eminent services, performed with much care, courage and fidelity ... in the northern parts’.144CJ vi. 174a, 299b, 407a; SP46/107, ff. 19v-20v.

Despite Lambert’s support for the army’s proceedings in December 1648, he apparently remained on cordial terms with his father-in-law Lister (who was among those secluded at Pride’s Purge) and, more importantly, with Fairfax.145Bodl. Tanner 56, f. 1; Farr, Lambert, 70-1, 73. He also retained the friendship of his long-time military colleague Colonel John Bright*, who had opposed the Remonstrance, although it is clear that the two men drifted apart politically from the winter of 1648-9.146Supra, ‘John Bright’; Farr, Lambert, 73-5. Lambert’s popularity with his officers is evident in their reaction to rumours in the spring of 1649 that he was destined for transfer to Cromwell’s expeditionary force to Ireland. ‘The report of his going to Ireland’, Margetts informed Baynes, ‘is displeasing to all parties [in the Northern Brigade], especially upon the report thereupon of Sir Arthur’s [Sir Arthur Hesilrige*, governor of the four northern counties] being his successor, for they say he will set the north all on fire’.147Add. 21417, f. 9. Margetts saw this perceived attempt to remove Lambert from the north, ‘where he is so useful’, as a design by Cromwell to advance Hesilrige.148Add. 21417, f. 129. In the event, Lambert was left undisturbed as head of the Northern Brigade, and the following year he was reunited with Cromwell as third to the latter’s second in command of the projected campaign to invade Scotland. With Fairfax’s resignation in June 1650, Cromwell replaced him as commander-in-chief with Lambert as his second in command. When Bright also resigned a few weeks later, his regiment was given to Lambert.149Farr, Lambert, 78. The resignations of Fairfax and Bright represented a more decisive break between the two men and Lambert than their differing reactions to the 1648 army Remonstrance.

The invasion of Scotland, 1650-1

Lambert, as Cromwell’s second in command, played a vital role in the invasion of Scotland. The English triumph at Dunbar in September 1650 owed at least as much to Lambert’s tactical brilliance as to Cromwell’s generalship; and Lambert’s subsequent victories at Hamilton and Inverkeithing have been described as ‘the immediate precursor to the destruction of the hopes of the Scots and Charles II at Worcester’.150Gentles, New Model Army, 394, 395, 396, 397-8, 400, 403; Farr, Lambert, 77-89. Lambert apparently had even fewer qualms than Cromwell about heaping destruction upon his fellow godly Protestants. ‘Truly I am confident they have filled the measure of their iniquities, and the Lord will speedily judge them.’151HMC Portland, i. 552. The radical Covenanter Archibald Johnston of Wariston* thought him ‘more untender, yea wicked, to all this nation [than Cromwell] and had not the principles of respect to the profession and professors of godliness’. Wariston was scandalised at reports that Lambert ‘defended witches’ and was all for burning Edinburgh to the ground in May 1651.152Wariston Diary, 52, 55, 59.

Yet although Lambert’s victory at Hamilton in December 1650 was a crushing blow to the Protesters (the anti-Stuart faction within the Kirk party), there were still those in ‘the honest party in Scotland’ (as Lambert had once referred to them) who quickly made their peace with him.153Clarke Pprs. ii. p. xxiv. Most of the Protesters would probably have welcomed news of the destruction of Charles II’s army at Worcester in September 1651, in which Lambert’s tactical skills once again contributed significantly to the victory.154Gentles, New Model Army, 404-9; Farr, Lambert, 90-1. A few days after the battle, on 9 September, the Rump settled Scottish lands worth £1,000 a year on him ‘for his great and eminent service to this commonwealth’.155CJ vii. 14a. Several historians have argued that the success of the New Model’s invasion of Scotland owed more to Lambert than to the ageing Cromwell and that by 1650 the younger man had supplanted his commander as the Rump’s most talented general.156B. Coward, Cromwell (2000), 78-9; Farr, Lambert, 91-2.

Lambert and the Rump, 1651-3

Lambert and Lieutenant-general Charles Fleetwood* had emerged by the end of the Worcester campaign as the most influential and respected men in the army after Cromwell.157Supra, ‘Charles Fleetwood’; Farr, Lambert, 77, 104. Lambert’s growing reputation is reflected in his appointment in October 1651 to a high-powered parliamentary commission for negotiating a union between England and Scotland.158CJ vii. 30b. Vane II and Oliver St John* probably headed the civilian contingent on this delegation, but Lambert was the senior military figure and used the negotiations to strengthen his links with Scottish radicals like Sir James Hope*. He was also the driving force behind measures for restructuring the civil and military establishment in Scotland.159Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Farr, Lambert, 108-9; A. Williamson, ‘Union with England traditional, union with England radical’, EHR cx. 313, 320, 321.

But it was Ireland, not Scotland, that seemed destined to provide Lambert’s greatest challenge as a soldier-politician. The army intelligencer Gilbert Mabbott reported in November 1651 that the House was debating ‘a fit person to command’ in Ireland as successor to the recently deceased Henry Ireton: ‘some talk of Major-general Lambert, others of Lieutenant-general Fleetwood’.160Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XX, f. 68v. On 23 January 1652, Whitelocke reported the council of state’s recommendation to the House that Lambert be appointed Cromwell’s acting deputy in Ireland.161CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 113; CJ vii. 77b. And a week later (30 Jan.), the Rump appointed Lambert lord deputy of Ireland under Cromwell – a position with which he had been linked since 1647.162CJ vii. 77a-b; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 317; v. 60; A. Guerdon, A Most Learned, Conscientious, and Devout-Exercise (1649), 13 (E.561.10). Although it is highly unlikely that Lambert have would succeeded Ireton without the approval of Cromwell, he was in no sense the lord general’s client. Relations between the two men were never as close as they were between Cromwell and some of the officers he had fought alongside during the first civil war. Lambert owed his early advancement to the Fairfaxes and was a senior military figure in his own right by the time he served directly under Cromwell during the second civil war.163Farr, Lambert, 92-3.

‘The eye of the world was upon Lambert’s being designed for Ireland’, and he spent the first half of 1652 outfitting himself in a manner appropriate to the dignity of his new position.164P. Warwick, Memoires (1701), 375; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 204; Farr, Lambert, 111-12. His most lavish outlays came in May with the purchase of the rectory, mansion house and manor of Wimbledon for a total of £17,555.165C54/3676/12, 23; C54/3677/29. Very shortly after these purchases he began to style himself ‘of Wimbledon’ – his mansion in Surrey becoming his main residence (he retained the Rumper John Goodwyn* as steward of his manorial courts).166C6/117/145. But unfortunately for the now cash-strapped Lambert, the House voted on 19 May not to renew Cromwell’s commission as lord lieutenant, nor to appoint a lord deputy – much to the surprise of army commentators: ‘this was sudden and unexpected’.167Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XXII, ff. 95r-v; CJ vii. 133a-134b; A Perfect Diurnall no. 128 (17-25 May 1652), 1887 (E.795.7). Lambert was offered the inferior post of commander-in-chief in Ireland but declined it – probably calculating that lacking a powerful interest at Westminster or a strong claim upon Cromwell’s loyalty, any office below the authority and status of lord deputy would leave him in a very exposed position.168Ludlow, Mems. i. 319; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 35; Farr, Lambert, 116. The only lasting benefit he derived from his brief tenure as lord deputy was the title ‘Lord Lambert’, which he retained until 1660.169B. Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the council’, in Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 87.

Contemporaries put various constructions on Lambert’s precipitous fall from the lord deputyship. Several commentators attributed it to Cromwell’s supposed jealousy of him or saw it as a design by the lord general to advance one of his own protégés in the army – in particular, his soon-to-be son-in-law Charles Fleetwood.170TSP vii. 660; Warwick, Memoires, 375; A Short Discovery of His Highness the Lord Protector’s Intentions (1655), 6 (E.852.3). Both explanations seem implausible, however, given that the minority tellers in the division on the 19 May vote – Whitelocke and Colonel Thomas Harrison I – were Cromwell’s friends in the House.171CJ vii. 133a-134b. The identity of the majority tellers – Henry Marten and Lambert’s rival in the north, Hesilrige – suggests that the impetus for downgrading Lambert’s office came from those republicans who were determined to keep the army and its commanders firmly subordinate to parliamentary authority.172Supra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; infra, ‘Henry Marten’; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 66; Farr, Lambert, 119-20. This is consistent with Edmund Ludlowe II’s* assertion that there were many in the Rump ‘who affirmed the title and office of [lord] lieutenant to be more suitable to a monarchy than a free commonwealth’. Ludlowe further claimed that although Cromwell accepted the scrapping of his own commission he tried to persuade the Rump to continue Lambert as lord deputy.173Infra, ‘John Weaver’; Ludlow, Mems. i. 318. Lambert himself reacted more like a victim of parliamentary than of army politics. Yet he may well have noted, and resented, Fleetwood’s tellership with Vane II on 21 May against resuming the debate on Cromwell’s successor as chief officer in Ireland.174CJ vii. 134b. Fleetwood was Lambert’s nearest rival for high honours and influence in the army until that summer, when he secured a decisive advantage by marrying Ireton’s widow – and Cromwell’s daughter – and accepting the position that Lambert had declined as commander-in-chief of the forces in Ireland.175Supra, ‘Charles Fleetwood’. There may have been little or no truth to the story recorded by Lucy Hutchinson – wife of Colonel John Hutchinson* – that Fleetwood had first met Bridget Ireton after she had been publicly snubbed by Lambert’s wife.176Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 204-5. Nevertheless, it reflected the tension between the two officers that spring and the potential for conflict between Lambert and Cromwell.177Mems. of Colonel Hutchinson ed. J. Hutchinson (1806), 327-8.

Lambert’s very public humiliation over the lord deputyship probably reinforced his conviction that untrammeled parliamentary power could be as wayward and overweening as that of any monarch. Baynes, Colonel Robert Lilburne* and several other members of Lambert’s circle had come to regard the Rump as self-serving, tyrannical and hostile to the interests of the army and the ‘saints’, and Lambert evidently shared this view.178Add. 21417, ff. 134, 281v; Add 21422, ff. 53, 61; Add. 21426, f. 341; Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XXV, ff. 44v-45; Scot. and Commonwealth ed. Firth, 135; Ludlow, Mems. i. 320, 346; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 72-3; Gentles, New Model Army, 418, 427-8; Farr, Lambert, 120, 122. His hostility towards the Rump was doubtless heightened by its determination to pack him off to Scotland in the spring of 1653 as commander-in-chief there – an office he was unwilling to accept.179Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XXV, ff. 8v, 9; CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 242, 279; Clarke Pprs. v. 60-1, 71; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 73. The Venetian resident thought that Lambert’s talents would be better employed in London, ‘considering the scarcity of other persons fitted to govern’, and Lambert doubtless agreed.180CSP Ven. 1653-4, p. 125. When Cromwell went to Westminster on 20 April to dissolve the Rump, he was accompanied by Harrison and Lambert.181Ludlow, Mems. i. 357. For the next six years, Lambert’s career would be played out in the political forcing houses of London rather than on military service in the north.

The Instrument of Government, 1653

With the fall of the Rump, Cromwell, Lambert and Harrison were immediately recognised as the three most influential men in the state – ‘the military triumviri’.182Bodl. Clarendon 45, f. 380; TSP i. 393, 395; Nicholas Pprs. ii. 13; Clarke Pprs. iii. 2; Farr, Lambert, 122. It seems that Cromwell, who clearly headed this triumvirate, was on better terms with Lambert than with Harrison at this stage (although Harrison was regarded by some observers as entirely Cromwell’s ‘creature’).183CCSP ii. 208; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 73-6. Certainly Cromwell trusted Lambert sufficiently to approve his appointment as first president of an interim council of state set up late in April to manage foreign affairs and ‘the ordinary administration of the realm’ – an office that Lambert took very seriously.184Bodl. Clarendon 45, f. 398; CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 301; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 106, 108. Writing to Sir Edward Hyde* in May, a London intelligencer pronounced Harrison a self-serving hypocrite, but gave a glowing assessment of Lambert:

…his interest is more universal both in the army and country [than Harrison’s] and not confined to a particular party. They speak him an unfathomed person, still undeclared ... They say he hath the ruling reason in the council [of state] and when the general [Cromwell] is absent, hath still the chair. He cunningly and tacitly opposes Harrison and the general, and he knows himself hard enough for Harrison – some think, for them both. He hath the present vogue, as a person that would (or might, at least) do something considerable for the dissolved Parliament [i.e. the Rump]; some hope, for the king also. I conceive the inducements to this opinion are that ... he is not severely of any opinion in religion inconsistent with monarchy ... that he is a gentleman born and many of his kindred and friends firmly of that party; that he is a man learned and well qualified, of courage, conduct, good nature and discretion. It is most certain he opposes Sir Henry Vane’s readmittance into power, declaring that if he come in, he [Lambert] will absent himself ... The general hath the absolute power with the officers, Lambert with the common soldier ... and if there be any opposition [to Cromwell], it will probably proceed from, at least be backed by, him.185Bodl. Clarendon 45, ff. 380v-381, 399v.

Yet despite Lambert’s undoubted influence in the army’s counsels that spring, and his likely preference for vesting power in a small council of state, the majority of the officers, Cromwell evidently among them, opted for something that was closer in spirit to Harrison’s proposal for a Jewish Sanhedrin of 70 people. The result was the Nominated Parliament.186Clarke Pprs. iii. 4; Ludlow, Mems. i. 358; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 108-9; D. P. Massarella, ‘The Politics of the Army 1647-60’ (York Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1977), 311, 312, 326.

There is every likelihood that Lambert played a central role in nominating Members to the new Parliament. Indeed, it was later alleged that he combined with Cromwell and other ‘moderates’ to ensure the selection of men who would ‘counterpoise’ Harrison and his Fifth-Monarchists.187A Faithfull Searching Home Word (1659), 14, 16 (E.774.1); Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 121-2; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 317. Lambert’s voice would certainly have been heard in deciding who would represent his native Yorkshire. One of the men initially selected was his close friend John Bright – who refused to sit.188Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 139. And of the eight men who made the final cut, over half had served alongside Lambert in the northern wars.189Supra, ‘Yorkshire’; Carroll, ‘Yorks.’, 330. But despite his role in deciding the Nominated Parliament’s membership, Lambert showed little enthusiasm for its proceedings. Co-opted with Cromwell and Harrison on 5 July, he was named to only four committees – including two for Scottish and one for Irish affairs – and according to the newsbooks never took his seat.190CJ vii. 281b, 283b, 286b; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 276; Farr, Lambert, 123. On 9 July, he was appointed after Cromwell to a new 14-man council of state, but again his heart was not in it.191CJ vii. 283a. Having been one of the most active members of the interim council set up in April, he ceased attending council meetings altogether after 2 July.192CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. xxxvii, xli, 310, 320, 332, 342, 349, 377, 387, 393, 395, 410, 421, 451. It was reported in August that ‘Lambert forbears the Parliament and council much of late, he solaces at Wimbledon and hath the visits of the most eminent of the northern gentry’.193Bodl. Clarendon 46, f. 113; Farr, Lambert, 123. In the autumn, he seems to have retired to Yorkshire.194Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 277; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 327. His evident disdain for the Nominated Parliament was noted by its Members, who failed to elect him to the seventh council of state in November.195CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. xl; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 313. His omission from the council would not have concerned him, for by mid-October he was busy about the preparation of a new constitution – the Instrument of Government.196Ludlow, Mems. i. 369.

Very little is known about the drafting of the Instrument of Government. All the sources agree that Lambert was its main promoter. But the question remains how much of the version that was publicly read out in Westminster Hall on 16 December was his own work. It is likely that he was the chief, possibly the sole, author during the early stages of the Instrument’s formulation in October and November. Between late November and mid-December, however, the new constitution was evidently discussed, and possibly extensively revised, by Cromwell and his closest military and civilian colleagues.197The Protector (So Called) in Part Unvailed (1655), 12 (E.857.1); A True Catalogue of the Several Places and Persons (1659), 3, 7 (E.999.12); Ludlow, Mems. i. 369-70; TSP i. 632; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iii. 455; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 352-60; P. Gaunt, ‘Drafting the Instrument of Government, 1653-4’, PH viii. 29, 37; Farr, Lambert, 124-5, 126, 149-50; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 334-41. One of the key issues under discussion was whether Cromwell should accept the title of king – a proposal that Lambert apparently endorsed, but Cromwell himself rejected.198Burton’s Diary, i. 382; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iv. 418; Ludlow, Mems. i. 370; ii. 29; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 355; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 341-2. The Instrument was subject to further revision between 16 December and its publication on 2 January 1654, in the process of which, the balance between parliamentary immunity from dissolution and the power of the executive to dispense with its proceedings was shifted in the protector’s favour.199Gaunt, ‘Drafting the Instrument of Government’, 28-42. In light of Lambert’s aversion to unbounded Parliaments, this again suggests that the pre-16 December version was by no means all his own work. There are fewer grounds for uncertainty in regarding Lambert as the prime mover in bringing the Nominated Parliament to a precipitate close on 12 December, in what amounted to a quiet but effective military coup.200The Protector (So Called), 12; A True Catalogue, 9; TSP i. 632; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 346-7, 354-6; Farr, Lambert, 125-6. By dissolving Parliament, he effectively pushed Cromwell into embracing the Instrument and the role of chief magistrate. At a ceremony in Westminster Hall on 16 December in which Lambert bore the sword of state, Cromwell was installed as lord protector.201Ludlow, Mems. i. 372-3. Lambert’s place within the new constitutional order was formally recognised with his inclusion among the 15 men named in the Instrument for elevation to the protectoral council of state.202CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 16; Gaunt, ‘Drafting the Instrument of Government’, 30-1; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 369.

The Instrument of Government offers a window on Lambert’s political thinking at what was a critical juncture in his career. In its provisions for a powerful, well-defined and largely independent executive, the new constitution evinced ‘an intense distrust of Parliaments’. The protectoral Parliaments were to hold ‘only limited legislative powers, were set about by potentially severe restrictions and held a rather weak position within government, markedly inferior to the executive’.203Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 370-1; P. Gaunt, ‘“The single person’s confidants and dependants”’, HJ xxxii. 544-5; Farr, Lambert, 129. The Instrument thus represented an attempt to safeguard the ‘fundamentals’ – liberty of conscience, for example – by strengthening the executive (rather than weakening it, as the Levellers had sought to do) at the expense of the legislative. ‘Having no rules to circumscribe Parliaments’, Lambert later declared, would be to ‘expose the people’s liberties to an arbitrary power’.204Burton’s Diary, i. 281-2. ‘The keystone of the newly-flung-up arch of government’ was the protectoral council, which looks very much like a more fully fleshed-out version of the council of state set down in the Heads of Proposals. It certainly enjoyed more wide-ranging powers than either the royal privy council or the Rump’s council of state. Clearly Cromwell would be the dominant force in the protectorate. But in many areas of government he could not act without the consent of his council. It was ‘a stable, permanent and very powerful body ... largely entirely independent not only of Parliament but also of the Protector’s influence’.205I. Roots, The Great Rebellion, 171; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 368-70, 377; Gaunt, ‘Cromwell and his protectoral councillors’, 546-7; Farr, Lambert, 129, 130-1. Yet although it was the council that exercised many of the essential checks upon Parliament, it was the power of the single person under the Instrument that most worried the government’s republican critics, who included a number of senior army officers. In imposing restraints upon the ‘arbitrary power’ of Parliament, the Instrument had in their eyes veered too much towards the monarchical. It was Cromwell therefore, not the arch-conciliarist Lambert, who suffered most criticism as a result of the new constitution.

Protectoral councillor, 1654-7

‘His lordship’, as Lambert was styled in the council’s minutes, ‘enjoyed an eminence far above’ that of any other protectoral councillor. He was, for example, the only councillor to host a meeting of the council in his own lodgings at Whitehall, to operate his own intelligence service, to draft letters in Cromwell’s name, or (so far as we know) to drive the protector to distraction by refusing to obey his orders.206Original Letters and Pprs. ed. Carte, ii. 79-80; B. Worden, God’s Instruments (2012), 205-7; ‘Cromwell and the council’, 87. Reports from London in the spring of 1656 claimed that Lambert was ‘daily in council and carries all before him as he thinks best’.207Original Letters and Pprs. ed. Carte, ii. 79; TSP iv. 676. That he worked hard to earn his £1,000 a year salary as a protectoral councillor is beyond doubt. Only the council’s president – Henry Lawrence* – and Lambert’s political ally and probable friend Walter Strickland* attended more of its meetings between 1653 and 1657.208CSP Dom. 1654, p. xliv; 1655, p. xxviii; 1655-6, p. xxx; 1656-7, p. xxii; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 381; Worden, ‘Cromwell and the council’, 102. He was particularly active in the first nine months of the protectorate, when he helped to steer several key finance ordinances through the council as it endeavoured to add legislative flesh to the bones of the Instrument before the meeting of the first protectoral Parliament.209CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 414; 1654, pp. 19, 119, 149, 217; Clarke Pprs. v. 165, 168; Farr, Lambert, 130-1. If his conciliar appointments and reporting of ordinances are any guide, he was active across a huge range of council business, including the collection and improvement of public revenue, the maintenance of the armed forces and the organisation and financing of the protector’s household.210CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 348, 381, 398, 414; 1654, pp. 19, 46, 119, 149, 180, 217, 284, 328, 355; 1655, pp. 57, 189, 235, 251, 256, 329, 370; 1655-6, pp. 2, 5, 8, 9, 37, 89, 203, 213; 1656-7, pp. 14, 90, 98, 193, 237, 244, 247, 385; Farr, Lambert, 131. But he was especially prominent in the council’s handling of Scottish and Irish affairs. He was named to numerous committees relating to the protectoral administration of the two commonwealths, chaired the committee for Irish affairs and – with Fleetwood – dominated the Scottish committee at Whitehall.211CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 311, 365, 404; 1654, pp. 119, 181, 197, 251, 263, 291, 382; 1655, pp. 160, 204, 250, 251, 256, 284, 352; 1655-6, pp. 5, 6, 129; 1656-7, pp. 45, 199, 240, 385; Farr, Lambert, 131-2; P. Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union (2004), 90, 92, 107, 134; Worden, ‘Cromwell and the council’, 87. General George Monck* probably owed his appointment as commander-in-chief of Scotland, early in 1654, to Lambert, who would remain his main point of contact with the English council until 1657.212Infra, ‘George Monck’. Lambert’s interest in nurturing the arts and sciences is clear from his appointment to conciliar committees on the Scottish universities, for establishing a college of physicians in Edinburgh, to receive the library of the celebrated churchman Dr James Ussher and for the advancement of music.213CSP Dom. 1654, p. 285; 1656-7, pp. 183, 199, 285. And he was particularly closely involved in the protectorate’s most ambitious project for the advancement of learning, the establishment of a university at Durham.214CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 140, 213, 218; 1656-7, p. 100.

When it came to the protectorate’s foreign policy, Lambert was apparently keen to promote friendly relations with Sweden and (in 1654, at least) Spain, and he played a leading role in negotiating a peace with the Dutch in 1654.215CSP Dom. 1654, p. 73; 1655-6, pp. 6, 20, 120; 1656-7, p. 41; Clarke Pprs. iii. 69; Swedish Diplomats at Cromwell’s Court 1655-6 ed. M. Roberts (Cam. Soc. ser. 4, xxxvi), 325, 330; Farr, Lambert, 135-6. The French believed that he and his allies on the council and in the army were eager for war against France, ‘since war is the source of the consideration they enjoy and the best means to avoid the weakening of their authority as well as their succession in the current government, which would be easy enough for the protector to accomplish if he set himself free from all other affairs’.216M. Guizot, Hist. of Oliver Cromwell and the English Commonwealth (1856), ii. 457-8, 459. However, claims that Lambert consistently advocated an aggressive policy towards France do not bear close scrutiny.217Gardiner, Hist. Commonwealth and Protectorate, iii. 119, 127, 128; Farr, Lambert, 135. In the second protectoral Parliament, for example, he was closely associated with measures for promoting the war against Spain, as were two leading members of his ‘party’, Baynes and Luke Robinson.218CJ vii. 428b, 431a, 431b, 445b; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 252. Sustaining hostilities against the Spanish provided a powerful rationale for strengthening the rule of the major generals – a policy championed by Lambert and other army grandees, notably John Disbrowe* (see below).219Supra, ‘John Disbrowe’. The Spanish agent Ignatius White would refer to Lambert as ‘a man that was an irreconcilable enemy to the Spanish interest and by them believed to have been a main instrument of the war’.220Mr Ignatius White His Vindication (1660), 17-18. Nevertheless, by opposing Cromwell, as he seems to have done, over the Western Design against Spain’s American colonies he was implicitly taking an anti-French line. Although a paper purportedly relating exchanges between the two men over this issue (possibly in council) on 20 July 1654 is of doubtful veracity, the main objections attributed to Lambert – namely, that the protectorate had enough on its plate sorting out Scotland and Ireland and that it was not financially secure enough to mount such an ambitious expedition – are consistent with his role in managing public finances and Scottish and Irish affairs.221Clarke Pprs. iii. 207-8; Gaunt, ‘Cromwell and his protectoral councillors’, 550; Farr, Lambert, 135. He adopted a similarly pragmatic, domestic-oriented perspective in 1659 on whether to send a fleet to the Baltic to protect English trading interests in the war between Denmark and Sweden: ‘I will not judge whether this be a Protestant war or no, but that which concerns you is a war which interests yourselves. The interest of England is, or ought to be, the great care of the business ... Look principally upon the interest at home’.222Burton’s Diary, iii. 400-1.

Lambert and the first protectoral Parliament, 1654-5

Lambert was returned for Surrey as well as his native West Riding in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in July 1654 and apparently sat for both places.223Supra, ‘Surrey’; ‘Yorkshire’. The county of Yorkshire had been awarded 14 parliamentary seats under the Instrument of Government – six for the West Riding and four each for the East and North Ridings. The Instrument’s scheme for the redistribution of parliamentary seats was taken more or less in its entirety from the Rump’s bill for a new representative, which in turn was based largely on the second Agreement of the People as amended by the army in 1648-9.224Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 371-2. Unfortunately, the bill for a new representative was pocketed by Cromwell when he dissolved the Rump, and its exact contents are unknown. On 9 March 1653, the House had resolved upon the six, four, four distribution of Yorkshire county seats – a departure from the Agreement, which had allowed 15 seats, probably five for each riding.225CJ vii. 265a-266b. However, there is no record that the Rump debated the distribution of Yorkshire borough constituencies. Under the Agreement, certainly, only three boroughs were given seats – York, Hull and Leeds – whereas the Instrument allotted seats to a further four boroughs, including Halifax, which, like Leeds, had not previously been enfranchised.226A Petition from His Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax (1649) 13-14 (E.539.2). Halifax was the closest large town in the West Riding to Lambert’s birthplace, and it is tempting to see its enfranchisement either as an attempt by the Rump to curry favour with him (as its reorganisation of the county seats in favour of the West Riding may have been) or as his own handiwork when drafting the Instrument. In the event, Leeds and Halifax returned two of his political allies – Baynes and Jeremy Bentley.227Supra, ‘Jeremy Bentley’.

The elections for the West Riding in 1654 suggest that Lambert’s influence in the region was confined largely to the clothing district and to those sections of the electorate who identified with him as a champion of the army’s interests and religious toleration, notably sectarians and Catholics. It is worth noting that he was returned in second place not only for Surrey, but also for his native West Riding – Sir Thomas (now 3rd Baron) Fairfax taking the senior place. How much this was due to Fairfax’s enduring popularity in the region, and how much to Lambert’s decision to remain in London rather than attend the elections in person, is impossible to say. Furthermore, only one of the five other men who were returned for the West Riding in 1654 – Lambert’s brother-in-law Martin Lister – can be assigned to his political network with any certainty, and even so Lambert’s electoral agents had to work very hard to win him a seat. John Bright, although Lambert’s friend, was closer to Fairfax politically, as were Edward Gill and Henry Tempest.228Supra, ‘Yorkshire’. There is little to indicate that Lambert’s electoral influence was felt much outside of the West Riding. Overall, the government could have no major cause for complaint with the candidates returned by the county’s voters in 1654, but this owed relatively little to Lambert.

The temper of the first protectoral Parliament probably came as a rude shock to Lambert. Rather than endorsing the Instrument, as the council had hoped, the majority of Members were determined to reassert the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Although opposed to the House’s attempt to dismantle the Instrument, Lambert evidently took the opportunity to revise some of its central provisions, and in particular the nature of Cromwell’s office as protector. Reporting on a parliamentary debate in October on whether Cromwell’s office should be elective or hereditary, the French ambassador claimed that Lambert had made ‘a long speech to persuade the Parliament that it was necessary to make the charge of protector hereditary’.229Burton’s Diary, i. pp. li, lii; TSP ii. 681, 685; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 249-50; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 448. Perhaps Parliament’s determination to free itself from the constitutional restraints that Lambert had imposed upon it had increased his own determination to strengthen the executive arm of government. Four of the 15 committees to which he was named in this Parliament related to a bill for reforming the protectoral settlement.230CJ vii. 366b, 368b, 369a, 370a, 370b, 371b, 374a, 374b, 375b, 380a, 381a, 392b, 399b, 401a. Similarly, all three of his tellerships were in divisions on this controversial piece of legislation. On 14 November, he and his fellow protectoral councillor Sir Charles Wolseley were minority tellers in favour of the House considering the introduction of an oath binding future MPs not to alter the government by a single person and a Parliament – a deliberate echo of the formula employed in the 1654 election indentures stipulating that those ‘so chosen shall not have power to alter the government as it is now settled in one single person and a Parliament’.231CJ vii. 385a. On 21 December, Lambert was a majority teller with another protectoral councillor, Colonel Philip Jones, against adding a proviso to the bill that the laws of the Commonwealth should not be altered ‘but by the common consent of the people assembled in Parliament’ – a notion that would have rendered the Instrument a dead letter.232CJ vii. 406a. And two days later (23 December), he was a majority teller with John Trevor in favour of referring the bill to a committee of the whole House – presumably because he felt more confident of restraining the Instrument’s enemies on the floor of the House than in committee.233CJ vii. 408a.

Lambert was named first to three committees in this Parliament – those for remodelling the armed forces, drafting a clause in a bill for settling the government and for erecting a court of justice in the northern counties – and may well have chaired at least two of them.234Supra, ‘Adam Baynes’; CJ vii. 370b, 392b, 401a. His appointment to a committee set up on 31 October 1654 to consider the petition of Sir William Killigrew concerning the draining of the Lincolnshire fens was probably linked to the fact that he and Adam Baynes had purchased estates in the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire fens under the Rump and were apparently willing to entertain plans for the drainage and enclosure of the fenlands, even when advanced by old royalists and Caroline ‘projectors’ like Killigrew.235C5/465/5, 6; Add. 21418, ff. 1, 2, 72; Add. 21422, ff. 80, 125, 131; Add. 21423, f. 134; Add. 21427, ff. 139v-45; CJ vii. 622b. Both Lambert and Baynes appear to have been on friendly terms with Killigrew, who looked to them for support at Whitehall against the ‘commoners’ – a group of smaller landowners and tenant farmers opposed to the draining of the fens – and their gentry allies like Thomas Hall* of Donington.236Add. 21422, ff. 80, 131, 146; Add. 21423, ff. 139, 193; CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 57; K. Lindley, Fenland Riots and the Eng. Revolution (1981), 46, 51; Farr, Lambert, 162-3. But in general Lambert can have taken very few positives from this Parliament and almost certainly welcomed its dissolution by Cromwell on 22 January 1655.

The major-generals

Although the major-generals experiment was modelled on Disbrowe’s governorship of the west country, it was generally regarded as Lambert’s brainchild.237Supra, ‘John Disbrowe’; C. Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals (2001), 21, 22, 23, 33-34; Farr, Lambert, 137-8. The scheme was arguably an over-reaction to a series of setbacks – the abortive royalist risings of early 1655, the collapse of the first protectoral Parliament and the failure of the Western Design – and was to prove perhaps the biggest political miscalculation of Lambert’s life.238A. Woolrych, ‘The Cromwellian protectorate: a military dictatorship?’, History lxxv. 219-23; Farr, Lambert, 137-8. But this is not to say that it was solely his initiative. He apparently had the backing of Cromwell and the council, and particularly of his fellow military grandees (Fleetwood, Disbrowe and Philip Skippon*) and their civilian allies Henry Lawrence, Sir Gilbert Pykeringe* and Walter Strickland.239C.S. Egloff, ‘The search for a Cromwellian settlement’, PH xvii. 193. That Lambert was a, probably the, leading figure in promoting and supervising the major-generals is clear from his conciliar appointments for drawing up their instructions and orders.240CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 296, 370; 1655-6, pp. 89, 202, 341, 372, 382; 1656-7, pp. 65, 167. His experience as commander of the Northern Brigade and as a military governor of Scotland would have left him in no doubt how effective the soldiery could be in enforcing the will of central government. Regional military rule seemed to offer a guarantee of regular pay for the army – a vital requirement in the wake of Parliament’s precipitate dissolution – greater security and an opportunity to promote godliness.

But for Lambert, the major-generals scheme was more than simply a matter of good government or the reformation of manners. In his public dealings since the battle of Worcester he had generally supported Cromwell’s agenda of reconciliation and leniency towards the royalists in England.241Gentles, New Model Army, 418. And on a personal level, he had maintained warm relations with his kinsman and one-time military opponent John Belasyse and had given financial assistance to several northern royalists, including Sir Thomas Ingram*.242Farr, Lambert, 159-67. For Lambert, as perhaps for Cromwell, the major-generals were intended partly to punish the royalists for their breach of faith in continuing to defy providence as well as the state.243Burton’s Diary, i. 240; Durston, Major-Generals, 29, 32. Lambert himself was made major-general for Yorkshire, Lancashire (which was later assigned to Major General Charles Worsley*) and the four northernmost counties, but being unwilling to leave London he appointed Robert Lilburne* and Charles Howard* to act as his deputies.244CSP Dom. 1655, p. 275; TSP iv. 177; Durston, Major-Generals, 22, 26, 27. His preference for influencing events from the centre meant that unlike some of his military colleagues he made no attempt to augment his authority either locally or nationally by appointment to commissions of oyer and terminer and gaol delivery.245Woolrych, ‘The Cromwellian protectorate’, 221; Farr, Lambert, 132-3. Even in the Leeds area, where his local interest was strongest, his friend and political client Adam Baynes had to struggle very hard to stay one step ahead of his Presbyterian opponents.246Supra, ‘Leeds’; ‘Adam Baynes’. That Lambert was not vitally interested in translating his power at the centre into local influence is suggested by the latitude he allowed his two deputies. For whereas Lilburne threw himself wholeheartedly into his new role, although to relatively little effect, Howard took a much more hands-off, relaxed approach.247Supra, ‘Charles Howard’; infra, ‘Robert Lilburne’; Farr, Lambert, 139. Lambert’s failure to establish a strong regional power-base made him more vulnerable politically than his central offices might suggest, and was doubly unwise given his uncertain following within the army.

The strength of Lambert’s interest among the soldiery is difficult to gauge. He was evidently a powerful patron for junior officers, and there are grounds for believing claims that many of Cromwell’s life-guard were of his choosing.248Original Letters and Pprs. ed. Carte, ii. 79; TSP ii. 414; iii. 675; CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 203, 236; Farr, Lambert, 147, 149; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 433. His most loyal followers among the senior officers, certainly by the late 1650s, were Major General James Berry* (who had reportedly helped him draft the Instrument of Government), Major General Thomas Kelsey* (who had been his deputy as governor of Oxford) and his fellow protectoral councillor Colonel William Sydenham*.249Supra, ‘James Berry’; ‘Thomas Kelsey’; ‘William Sydenham’; A. Fletcher, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the localities’, in Politics and People in Revolutionary England ed. C. Jones, M. Newitt, S. Roberts (1986), 189-90; Egloff, ‘Exclusions from the second protectorate Parliament’, 186; Little, Broghill, 126; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 339, 483, 540, 564, 616, 677. But it is by no means certain that he was the ‘darling’ of the army generally, despite numerous reports to that effect.250Original Letters and Pprs. ed. Carte, ii. 79; TSP ii. 681; iv. 676; CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 236; CSP Ven. 1655-6, pp. 227, 312; CCSP iii. 107, 239, 344, 415-16; M. Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell (1856), i. 379, 381; Farr, Lambert, 146-7. His affluent lifestyle, lavish land purchases, his interest in artworks, and his reputation as one of England’s pre-eminent ‘florists’ were not the most obvious qualifications for exciting admiration among the rank-and-file.251Add. 29569, f. 212; Sheffield Univ. Lib. Hartlib Pprs. 28/2/36A; 29/6/9A; 29/6/19B; 51/41A; Farr, Lambert, 198-201. Similarly, his involvement in drafting the Instrument, and his call in October 1654 for making the protectorate hereditary, would have dismayed a wider section of the army than the doctrinaire republican element represented by Colonels Matthew Alured*, John Okey* and Thomas Sanders*. In fact, according to one commentator, Cromwell’s use of Lambert to ‘cajole’ the army had rendered him unpopular among the soldiery.252CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 264. Nor would his willingness to extend toleration to Quakers and, in practical terms, Catholics have played well with many of his military colleagues.253CSP Ven. 1657-9, p. 78. How much popularity he won in the army as the perceived initiator of the major-generals scheme is not clear. But there is every indication that during the protectorate, Fleetwood and Disbrowe enjoyed at least as much support within the officer corps as Lambert did, if only because they were closer to Cromwell.254Supra, ‘John Disbrowe’; ‘Charles Fleetwood’; Farr, Lambert, 133. Lambert’s military network ‘remained focused on his close northern associates’ and at no time came close to rivalling that of Cromwell.255Farr, Lambert, 111, 133, 147-8. Moreover, his resolve to remain in London and play the politician may also have isolated him from many soldiers, not least those of his own regiments stationed in northern England.256Farr, Lambert, 148; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 665-6.

Lambert and the second protectoral Parliament, 1656

The government’s dire financial situation by the spring of 1656 – made even worse by the failure of the major-generals scheme to pay its own way – led Lambert, Fleetwood and the other military grandees on the council to press for another Parliament. Cromwell and a significant minority on the council were strongly opposed to this measure, and even its supporters considered various expedients for ensuring that the House would be more conformable to the government’s will than its predecessor had been.257Gaunt, ‘Cromwell and his protectoral councillors’, 557-8; Egloff, ‘Exclusions from the second protectorate Parliament’, 184-5. One of these expedients, it seems, was that Cromwell assume the title of king. Evidently Lambert and some of his fellow officers ‘had no objection to a Cromwellian monarchy provided that the army was its architect’.258Egloff, ‘Exclusions from the second protectorate Parliament’, 185-6. With the backing of the major-generals, Lambert and the military faction in the council convinced Cromwell that they had the means to secure a reasonably conformable House – which being the case, the results of the elections held that August must have come as an unwelcome surprise. Across the country, military candidates and friends of the army proved very unpopular with the electorate – and nowhere did this emerge more clearly than in the West Riding, where Lambert stood for re-election. The one bright spot for Lambert was that he secured first place on this occasion, although this was probably down to the strong Quaker presence among the electorate. He would almost certainly have been beaten into second place if Fairfax had decided to stand (why he did not is a mystery). However, all five of the other successful candidates were either members of Fairfax’s interest or enemies of the protectorate, or both. Even more revealingly, three candidates who stood on Lambert’s or the army’s ticket – Baynes, Lister and Captain William Bradford – were defeated by the strength of ‘the combination at York [Castle]’ against Lambertonians and ‘swordsmen’. Clearly the unpopularity of the major-generals had eroded Lambert’s already narrow support-base in the West Riding. The only one of the three ridings to return a full complement of men conformable to the government interest was the North Riding, where Major-general Lilburne’s troop concentrations were at their heaviest.259Supra, ‘Yorkshire’.

Lambert has been identified, probably correctly, as ‘the moving force’ behind the council’s exclusion of 100 or so Members from the second protectoral Parliament.260Egloff, ‘Exclusions from the second protectorate Parliament’, 193, 195. The memory of the previous Parliament’s attempt to dismantle the frame of government was doubtless fresh in his mind, and he apparently preferred this crude method of silencing the Instrument’s critics rather than risk a repeat performance. In the case of the West Riding, four of the six men elected were excluded by the council – largely, it seems, because they had backed the ‘high kirk gang’ at Leeds in its power-struggle against Baynes and others of Lambert’s interest.261Supra, ‘Adam Baynes’; C.S. Egloff, ‘The search for a Cromwellian settlement … Part 2’, PH xvii. 315. The exclusions did immense damage to the protectorate (as constituted under the Instrument) generally and to Lambert’s political credibility and his relations with Cromwell in particular. It was no coincidence that within a few months of the House assembling, a new and thoroughly civilian model for settlement would be offered to Cromwell by a group of MPs headed by Lambert’s main political rival, Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill* – lord president of the council of Scotland and effectively the most powerful man in the Scottish state. Like his ally Henry Cromwell*, the de facto governor of Ireland, Broghill favoured a more traditional form of settlement in which the army would be firmly subordinate to civilian interests, and toleration would be denied to religious radicals. Such ideas were, of course, anathema to Lambert and other officers whose political consciousness had been forged in battle and the army’s confrontation with the Long Parliament.

During 1655-6, there was a muted power-struggle between Lambert and Broghill for control of Scottish policy, particularly in relation to the Kirk. Broghill was keen to stabilise Scottish politics by trying to bring the moderate, pro-Stuart wing of the Scottish Presbyterian ministry – known as the Resolutioners – into the Cromwellian fold. The hard-line faction in the Kirk – the Protesters – led by James Guthrie and Patrick Gillespie, looked to Lambert, Fleetwood and Monck to keep the Resolutioners in disfavour at Whitehall. The leading Resolutioner divine James Sharpe referred to Lambert as ‘the grand enemy of us and our cause’. The influence of Lambert and the military grandees on the council, and particularly in its Scottish committee, was generally sufficient to act as brake on Broghill’s initiatives.262Infra, ‘George Monck’; Baillie Lttrs. And Jnls. iii. 354-5, 356, 361, 396; Consultations of the Ministers of Edinburgh ed. W. Stephen (Scottish Hist. Soc. ser. 3, xvi), 20, 23-5, 30-2, 43, 47; Little, Broghill, 107, 119, 126, 130, 133-4; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 279-80. But this was to change after the assembling of the second protectorate Parliament. Broghill and his allies may not have out-gunned Lambert at Whitehall – although that is debateable. But they had stronger ties with Cromwell and had formed broader political networks – based upon their offices and connections in Scotland, Ireland and (courtesy of Colonel Philip Jones) Wales – than any Lambert and his friends possessed in England.263Little, Broghill, 126-30, 139. Moreover, when push came to shove in 1657, they could muster greater support at Westminster than could Lambert and those opposed to a parliamentary offer of kingship to Cromwell.

The first three months of the second protectoral Parliament – a period of relative calm before the political storms of 1657 – were apparently the busiest in Lambert’s parliamentary career.264Egloff, ‘Exclusions from the second protectorate Parliament’, 306. Appointed to 30 committees before 1657 (he was named to only a further 11 thereafter), he was named in first place to four of them – to prepare a declaration justifying the war against Spain (1 Oct.); to attend the protector and desire his consent for a day of thanksgiving for the victories against Spain (2 Oct.); for the improvement of the excise on beer and ale (25 Oct.); and to prepare a bill for preventing the election of delinquents to municipal office (28 Nov.).265CJ vii. 431b, 432b, 445b, 461a. He made several reports from the committee to attend Cromwell regarding the victories against Spain, which he very likely chaired.266CJ vii. 433b, 434a, 440a. He also showed an interest in legal reform, and on 3 November he introduced a bill for erecting a court of law and a court of equity in York, where the abolition of the council of the north was still lamented.267CJ vii. 449b; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 180, 181. In December, Lambert and Baynes introduced another northern reformist initiative – a bill for establishing a corporation to regulate cloth manufacture in the West Riding.268Infra, ‘Luke Robinson’; Burton’s Diary, i. 126-7; ii. 372.

The first of Lambert’s eight tellerships in this Parliament gave no indication of the constitutional wrangling that was ahead, for it saw him paired with Broghill on 22 September 1656 in support of a government-sponsored resolution that the excluded Members should apply to the council for approbation to sit and that in the meantime the House proceed with ‘the great affairs of the nation’.269CJ vii. 426b, 455b, 458a, 462a, 496b, 550b, 554a, 575a. Broghill’s willingness to acquiesce in the exclusions has been variously interpreted as a display of solidarity with the government or an expression of ‘residual hatred’ against the leading commonswealthsmen who had been excluded.270Egloff, ‘Exclusions from the second protectorate Parliament’, 303; Little, Broghill, 126. Lambert himself was thoroughly committed to the exclusions, as he made clear on those few occasions when the issue was raised in the House.271Burton’s Diary, i. 193, 194, 195, 281; Egloff, ‘Exclusions from the second protectorate Parliament’, 307. On 30 December, he invited Members to ‘consider what a Parliament you might have had’ if a ‘check’ had not been applied to keep out ‘those who may come to sit as our judges for all we have done in this Parliament, or at any other time and place’. In the absence of ‘rules to circumscribe Parliaments’, he argued, ‘the power must be trusted in some person, and fittest in the supreme magistrate’.272Burton’s Diary, i. 281-2; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 453-5. For Lambert at least, the exclusions – backed by the authority of the protector and council – were another safeguard against a parliamentary tyranny.

Yet despite the relatively easy ride given to the government and to the Instrument during the early months of the second protectoral Parliament, the power struggle between Lambert and Broghill over the future course of the protectorate rumbled on in the background. Central to Broghill’s plans for settlement were the bills for Scottish and Irish union that were introduced in the House that autumn.273Little, Broghill, 131, 134, 136. But though he and his allies apparently had a majority in the House committees for Scottish affairs and Irish affairs (of which Lambert was a member), his incapacity due to gout handed the initiative to his enemies. In his absence, Lambert, Baynes, Luke Robinson and other opponents of the bills were able to push them well down the Commons’ order of business or tie them up in committee.274CJ vii. 426b, 427a; Burton’s Diary, i. 15-16, 18; Little, Broghill, 130-7. Lambert also continued to frustrate Broghill’s Scottish church reforms. When the Resolutioners, with Broghill’s backing, began a lobbying campaign late in 1656 to consolidate their support among Presbyterian divines and politicians in England, the Protesters responded with appeals to leading Independent ministers and to their friends on the council, including Lambert, Fleetwood, Pykeringe and Strickland. The quarrel between the rival Kirk factions sparked an open fight between Lambert and Broghill for control of Scottish policy generally, culminating in March 1657 with the two men having a blazing row in the council.275Little, Broghill, 133-4

The Naylor controversy and Lambert’s religion

Lambert saw the fate of the Quaker evangelist and alleged blasphemer James Naylor as a test of the Instrument’s effectiveness in preventing the ‘orthodox’ mainstream at Westminster (which included Broghill) using parliamentary authority to exercise an unlimited judicial power or set limits upon liberty of conscience.276Burton’s Diary, i. 33, 215, 218, 255-6, 281-2; Farr, Lambert, 179-82; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 186-7. Naylor, a Yorkshireman, had served as a quartermaster in Lambert’s own troop of horse, and his former commanding officer had thought highly of him, as he informed the House on 5 December.

He was a man of a very unblameable life and conversation, a member of a very sweet society of an Independent church. How he comes (by pride or otherwise) to be puffed up to this opinion I cannot determine. But this may be a warning to us all, to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.277Burton’s Diary, i. 33; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 258-9; Farr, Lambert, 178-9.

Whereas Lambert and his friends tried to play down the seriousness of Naylor’s offence and to mitigate his punishment, Broghill’s allies were prominent among those MPs calling for the death penalty.278Little, Broghill, 140-1. The Naylor affair reinforced the conviction of Broghill and other Presbyterian MPs that the wide measure of toleration allowed under the Instrument was threatening the scripture-based orthodoxy that they thought vital to the political and religious stability of the state.

Lambert’s own confessional preferences, assuming he had any, have proved impossible to pin down.279Farr, Lambert, ch. 9. That he was, in the broadest sense, a man of godly sensibilities is beyond question. It is revealing that the Scottish Protester minister Patrick Gillespie continued his ‘frequent, familiar walking with Lambert’ even after the latter’s fall from power in the summer of 1657.280Baillie Lttrs. And Jnls. iii. 361. And Lambert, for his part, thought highly of the Independent divine John Owen, joining several other leading officers as members of Owen’s Whitehall congregation in the spring of 1659.281Burton’s Diary, iii. 12; Consultations of the Ministers of Edinburgh ed. Stephen 158; Complete Prose Works of John Milton ed. R.W. Ayers, vii. 61. Lambert’s regimental chaplains were almost all men of advanced puritan views and included the Seeker and radical anti-formalist William Erbery.282A. Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains (1990), 102, 124, 174; ‘William Erbery’, Oxford DNB. It would not be surprising if Lambert, as governor of Oxford in 1646-7, had shielded and perhaps even encouraged Erbery in his disputations with the Presbyterian visitors of the university, whose ‘barbarous work’ he was said to have distasted.283The Case of Colonel John Lambert, 3-4; ‘William Erbery’, Oxford DNB. Indeed, Lambert may already have been a seasoned campaigner against a ‘Covenant-engaged’ settlement by the time he confronted the Westminster Presbyterians in the spring of 1647; this would help to explain his remark to Fairfax that ‘betwixt them [the Presbyterian officers] and [us] is something past of heat and animosity’.

For all his godly friends and sympathies, Lambert may well have valued learning and intellectual curiosity in a clergyman above puritan piety – hence, perhaps, his patronage of the Yorkshire divine, and former royalist, Israel Tonge.284Sheffield Univ. Lib. Hartlib Pprs. 29/5/4A; ‘Israel Tonge’; ‘John Webster’, Oxford DNB; Worden, God’s Instruments, 154. Certainly Lambert’s godliness was tempered by a strongly ecumenical spirit that was more characteristic of certain radical sectarians and free-thinkers.285Farr, Lambert, 174-5. Toleration, for Lambert, was almost an article of religion itself. Clause XXXVII of the Instrument of Government (which was lifted more or less verbatim from the second Agreement of the People) expressed his views on this subject very well.

Such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ (though differing in judgement from the doctrine or discipline publicly held forth) shall not be restrained from, but shall be protected in, the profession of the faith and exercise of their religion; so as they abuse not this liberty to the civil injury of others and to the actual disturbance of the public peace on their parts.286Constitutional Docs. ed. Gardiner, 416.

He was identified as an opponent of tithes and was apparently willing to consider their replacement with some other method of maintenance – what, he never spelt out. He certainly favoured leniency for those who refused to pay tithes, serving as a teller with Luke Robinson on 24 November 1656 against imprisonment for this offence.287Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 79 (11-18 Dec. 1651), 1275-6 (E.651.5); CJ vii. 458a; Farr, Lambert, 183. Like his close friend Adam Baynes, he was sympathetic to the Quakers and shared something of their anti-formalism.288Supra, ‘Adam Baynes’. But he was less disdainful of the professional ministry than Baynes and the Quakers were and may well have been involved in selecting the Cromwellian triers and ejectors.289CSP Dom. 1655, p. 322; 1655-6, p. 252; Woolrych, ‘The Cromwellian protectorate’, 219. In contrast to Baynes, he was appointed an ejector and named to several parliamentary committees for promoting a preaching ministry.290A. and O.; CJ vii. 562b, 600b. He (or rather, his wife) had at least two of his ten children baptised, whereas none of Baynes’s 16 newborns saw the inside of a church.291Supra, ‘Adam Baynes’; Farr, Lambert, 67.

Resistance and defeat at Westminster, 1656-7

The political feud between Lambert and Broghill intensified with the debates late in December 1656 and into January 1657 over the militia bill. The bill proposed making the decimation tax permanent, and unless it passed the House the rule of the major-generals could not continue. On 23 December, in what was probably an attempt to test the waters prior to the bill’s introduction, Lambert, Lilburne, Robinson and Baynes urged the reading of a petition from the ‘well-affected’ of the North Riding, proposing that the burden of maintaining the army be laid entirely upon the royalists – in other words, a widening of the decimation tax.292CJ vii. 473; Burton’s Diary, i. 208-9. The militia bill was introduced by Disbrowe two days later (25 December) – its supporters clearly hoping to take advantage of what, on Christmas day, was a predictably thin House. Lambert regarded the bill as vital to the long-term survival of the protectorate as it was then constituted: ‘The quarrel is now between light and darkness; not who shall rule, but whether we shall live, or be preserved, or no. Good words will not do with the cavaliers ... This is a business of such consequence that I see not how we can proceed upon any thing till it be over’.293Burton’s Diary, i. 234, 240-1, 319, 322. However, Broghill and many other Members, including a significant number of Scottish and Irish MPs, argued for the bill to be laid aside as ‘against morality and honesty’.294Burton’s Diary, i. 233, 311-12; Little, Broghill, 141-4. Lambert and Disbrowe had the backing of their fellow protectoral councillors Strickland, Pykeringe and Sydenham and of Baynes, Robinson and other friends of the army, but it was not enough to win divisions. On 29 January 1657, the militia bill was rejected, which effectively spelled the end of the major-generals.295Supra, ‘John Disbrowe’; CJ vii. 483; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 109. The bill’s demise finally convinced Cromwell to abandon the Instrument of Government and to embrace instead a more conservative and civilian model for ‘healing and settling’.296Farr, Lambert, 140-3.

Lambert probably realised he was fighting a losing battle at Westminster well before the rejection of the militia bill, which may explain why he seems to have stayed away from the House for much of January and February, receiving only two committee appointments during these months.297CJ vii. 484a, 485a. The conservative trend in Cromwellian politics was confirmed on 23 February with the presentation to the House of the Remonstrance – a new constitutional blueprint drawn up by Broghill and his circle, proposing a return to two Houses of Parliament and a king.298Little, Broghill, 145-8. Lambert reportedly spoke ‘violently’ against the Remonstrance upon its introduction and was supported by Baynes, Disbrowe, Fleetwood, Pykeringe, Robinson, Sydenham and Walter Strickland.299PRO31/3/101, f. 81; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 203, 205; CJ vii. 496a; CSP Ven. 1657-9, p. 22; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 110. The next day (24 Feb.), Lambert and Strickland were tellers against proceeding to a more detailed reading of the draft constitution.300CJ vii. 496b. They lost the division by over 50 votes, and thereafter Lambert’s name disappears from the Journals until early April. Outvoted in the House, Lambert and other ‘considerable officers’ spent March complaining to Cromwell about developments at Westminster and urging him to reject the Remonstrance.301Henry Cromwell Corresp. 229, 243, 274; Clarke Pprs. iii. 92; TSP vi. 74, 93, 107; Farr, Lambert, 144; Little, Broghill, 153; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 110, 111. The Remonstrance also proved disagreeable to some of Broghill’s own allies, although for different reasons, and by the end of March it had been replaced by the somewhat less monarchical Humble Petition and Advice.302Little, Broghill, 149.

Lambert, though doubtless unhappy that the Instrument had been superseded, seems to have found the Humble Petition more acceptable than the Remonstrance. On 6 April 1657, he was named second after Broghill to a committee for explaining to Cromwell why the House adhered to the Humble Petition as presented to him on 31 March.303CJ vii. 520b. And following Cromwell’s rejection of the offer of the crown, on 8 May, Lambert was named to three committees for amending and presenting the Humble Petition – including the 19 May committee to consider how the title of protector should be ‘bounded, limited and circumstantiated’.304CJ vii. 535a, 538b, 540b. However, there would be no corresponding abatement in Lambert’s resentment towards Broghill; and when a vote was tabled on 5 June for settling Irish lands worth £1,000 a year on his rival, he joined Disbrowe, Fleetwood and Sydenham in withdrawing from the House.305Burton’s Diary, ii. 177-8. Not that Lambert had any principled objection to such grants, it seems, for a mere three days later (8 June) he was a teller in favour of settling an even larger estate in Ireland on Fleetwood.306Supra, ‘Charles Fleetwood’; CJ vii. 550b.

The resentment that the offer of the crown had stirred up in the army, and which Lambert, Disbrowe and other senior officers had skilfully exploited, had a major bearing on Cromwell’s decision not to accept the title king.307Supra, ‘John Disbrowe’; CSP Dom. 1656-7, pp. 336-7; Baillie Lttrs. And Jnls. iii. 359; Farr, Lambert, 144. Not that Lambert himself probably had any problem with the idea of a Cromwellian monarchy per se. It was the conservative, ‘civilianising’ agenda of the faction promoting it that he found so objectionable.308Farr, Lambert, 143. Given that he too had previously argued for making the protectorate hereditary – indeed, he had declared as recently as March 1657 that he was ‘not disinclined to gratify his Highness’ in regard to the succession – it is hard to credit claims that he had opposed the Remonstrance simply to preserve ‘his own evident interest’ in succeeding Cromwell as protector.309CSP Ven. 1657-9, p. 22; Baillie Lttrs. And Jnls. iii. 358; TSP vi. 20; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 49-50; Farr, Lambert, 150-1.

Cromwell’s refusal of the crown gave heart to Lambert and the army interest and reopened divisions among the ‘kinglings’. In a debate on 10 June 1657 on the Scottish and Irish assessments, a number of Presbyterian MPs supported Lambert, Baynes and other friends of the army in opposing reductions.310Burton’s Diary, ii. 207-19; Little, Broghill, 157-9. Even so, the army interest still did not command a majority in the House – Lambert and Lilburne suffering defeat as tellers in support of maintaining the assessment as its existing rate.311CJ vii. 554a. Five days later (15 June), however, Lambert and his allies were able to introduce an amendment to the Humble Petition that overturned a clause inserted by Broghill’s party for extending the Scottish franchise to include the Resolutioners and other Scots who had sided with Charles II since 1649.312Burton’s Diary, ii. 249-53; Little, Broghill, 159. Lambert had prevailed here through sheer persistence, for though the House had been ‘sick’ of the proposed amendment, he had ‘seconded, thirded and fourthed it, and when almost it was dung dead [sic] he asked a question whether it should be put to the question, and carried it’.313Wariston Diary, 81; Burton’s Diary, ii. 253; CJ vii. 557b. Lambert reportedly told the Protesters that ‘this vote laid a foundation and [they] should endeavour to build on it and to restore godly men in Scotland to that power and capacity they had in their best condition as in 1649’.314Wariston Diary, 84. An attempt on 25 June to weaken the force of this vote was defeated, with Lambert and Strickland acting as majority tellers against the proposed alteration.315CJ vii. 575a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 308.

The issue over which Lambert finally broke with Cromwell and the protectorate was not that of kingship but the imposition of a protectoral oath of allegiance. On 23 June 1657, just a few days before Parliament was due to be prorogued (26 June), Disbrowe raised the question of the oath that the Humble Petition required Cromwell to take as chief magistrate. He and others moved that the oath also be prescribed for the protectoral council and Parliament.316Burton’s Diary, ii. 274-6. This was not at all to Lambert’s liking, and he was almost certainly speaking for himself and his closest allies when he asked, ‘suppose it [the oath] have its ends so as to crush or strain the conscience of those that have faithfully served you and will still go on to serve you?’317Burton’s Diary, ii. 276. When the House then divided on whether to set up a committee to prepare the oath, he was among the minority that voted against the question – though he was subsequently named to the committee established for that purpose.318Burton’s Diary, ii. 282; CJ vii. 570b. The next day (24 June), Baynes tried to exclude any reference to religion in the oath, but the House insisted on a form of words that bound the swearer to uphold ‘to the uttermost of my power...the true reformed Protestant religion, in the purity thereof, as it is contained in the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament, and encourage the profession and professors of the same’.319Burton’s Diary, ii. 284-5; Constitutional Docs. ed. Gardiner, 462. In fact, Lambert like a number of his fellow officers objected to oaths on principle as ‘snares’ to the ‘conscientious’ (in May 1659 he would refuse to take the oath prescribed for councillors).320Burton’s Diary, ii. 295; Mayers, 1659, 57. To Lambert, ‘an oath was a sacred thing and ought to be guided by religion’.321Burton’s Diary, ii. 286, 289. Yet the religion implied in the 1657 oath was too narrow and scripture-based for Lambert, Baynes and especially their Quaker friends. Nevertheless, Lambert couched his objections to this particular oath in largely secular terms, arguing that it obliged the swearer to uphold two ‘contrary’ and incompatible sources of authority – the chief magistrate and the people as represented in Parliament.322Burton’s Diary, ii. 295.

Lambert did not attend the formal investiture of Cromwell as protector under the Humble Petition on 26 June 1657.323Henry Cromwell Corresp. 293; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 29. And when, in mid-July, he refused to take the oath required of protectoral councillors, Cromwell sent for him to resign his army commissions and civilian offices.324TSP vi. 412, 427; Clarke Pprs. iii. 113, 114. At their meeting to settle this matter, the protector ‘demanded of him if he were willing, to arrest further jealousies, to lay down his commission’, to which Lambert responded that ‘he would not turn his back upon the good cause he had so long owned, but if his Highness would command it from him under his hand and seal, he should have it’ – and Cromwell did so command.325Clarke Pprs. v. 262; CCSP iii. 343; CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 40. The protector softened this blow by granting Lambert £3,000 and a pension of £2,000 a year; which was generous, but could not make up for Lambert’s loss in salaried income as an officer and councillor of roughly £6,000 a year (although his arrears of pay as a councillor stood at £1,500 by mid-1655).326Clarke Pprs. v. 262; [G. Wharton], A Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 9 (E.935.5); TSP iii. 581; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 29-30; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 127. Cromwell’s subsequent claim that he had dismissed Lambert for demanding assurances about the succession smacks of an attempt to discredit Lambert as an ambitious self-seeker.327D. Underdown, ‘Cromwell and the officers, February 1658’, EHR lxxxiii. 103-4, 106. Lambert was certainly self-seeking enough to resist resigning until pushed by Cromwell and to accept a pension from him in recompense. Moreover, there are grounds for thinking that he might have wanted to go back on his decision to refuse the oath. Thurloe informed Henry Cromwell late in July that an unnamed individual ‘desired to serve in the council and offered to take his oath. That is paused upon. He is now retired in appearance’. The person referred to here may well have been Lambert.328TSP vi. 425; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 484-5.

The peaceable and outwardly dignified manner of Lambert’s fall from power aroused admiration among observers, but nothing more.329TSP vi. 427; CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 47. He would perhaps have provoked a stronger reaction in the army if he had decided to make a stand against the Humble Petition itself. But he had shown himself willing to serve the protectorate under the new constitution. His unwillingness to take the protectoral oath had proved his undoing, and this was not a cause that greatly excited his fellow councillors or officers. He was the only member of the council who refused the oath, and Baynes was the only other officer to resign or be cashiered that summer.330Supra, ‘Adam Baynes; infra, ‘Sir Gilbert Pykeringe’. Lambert’s decision was based partly on the not unreasonable assumption that the oath would ‘reach to all officers of trust, justices and the like’ and result in the removal of many of his natural allies in the army and localities.331Burton’s Diary, ii. 295. As it turned out, he was virtually the only man who refused the oath – and then not for very long, for he was obliged to take it when resuming his seat for the second session of Parliament in January 1658.332CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 273; Clarke Pprs. iii. 133; Burton’s Diary, ii. 372. His positions in the army and council were assigned to Fleetwood.333Supra, ‘Charles Fleetwood’.

Lambert and Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, 1659

Lambert would remain on the political fringes for the remainder of Oliver Cromwell’s life. It was said in March 1658 that no party had any use for him, and he was clearly persona non grata as far as the protector was concerned. Nevertheless, by the spring of 1658 he seems to have renewed his intimacy with Fleetwood and Disbrowe and was in close contact with Gillespie and other Scottish Protesters.334Baillie Lttrs. And Jnls. iii. 354-5, 356, 361; TSP vi. 829, 858; vii. 415. Cromwell’s death in September, and subsequent dissatisfaction in the army with Richard Cromwell’s civilianising agenda, offered Lambert a route back to power. By November, it was credibly reported that he and Disbrowe were involved in fomenting unrest in the army.335TSP vii. 528; G. Davies, The Restoration of Charles II (1969), 37-8.

So eager was Lambert to return to the political fray that he stood for three constituencies in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament – beginning with Yorkshire, which had reverted to traditional, two-Member franchise.336TSP vii. 588. An eye-witness to the shire election reported that ‘far more appeared’ for Lambert initially than for the man who eventually took second place, Thomas Harrison II, but that ‘acclamation’ for him subsided after it was observed that there were Quakers among his supporters.337Supra, ‘Yorkshire’. Having failed to win a county seat, he stood for two Yorkshire boroughs, Aldborough and Pontefract, and was returned for both. He had been closely associated with Pontefract under the Rump, as the commander of the siege of the castle in 1648-9 and as the owner of considerable property in the borough during the early 1650s.338SP46/107, ff. 19v-20v; A. and O. Moreover, in 1654 he had helped to secure an ordinance for the repair of the town’s court-house, which had been destroyed in the siege.339CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 344-5. But despite his ties with the town he was returned in 1659 only after ‘much contest and pains’ and a timely intervention on his behalf by John Bright and Martin Lister.340Supra, ‘Pontefract’. The nature of Lambert’s interest at Aldborough is not clear, and once at Westminster he opted to sit for Pontefract.341CJ vii. 610b.

Lambert was a leading figure in the anti-Cromwellian coalition in the third protectoral Parliament. The dominant partners in this loose alliance of interests were the commonwealthsmen – or republicans – headed by Vane, Hesilrige and several other men that Lambert had helped to turn out of Parliament in April 1653 or to suppress under the protectorate. In order to be included in their counsels he was required to atone for his ‘past actings’ against the republican interest, which he did by claiming that he been ‘animated against divers of the principal persons of the late Long Parliament by the instigation of his Highness [Oliver Cromwell]’.342TSP vii. 660; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 122. The likes of Hesilrige were probably not convinced by Lambert’s ‘great professions of sincerity’ towards his new allies, but they needed his influence within the army as much as he relied on their numbers and tactical experience in the Commons.

The first intimation of Lambert’s alignment with his erstwhile republican opponents came on 1 February 1659, when he joined them in insisting that the Bill of Recognition (the bill confirming Richard Cromwell as protector) required lengthy consideration, particularly with reference to the House’s privileges and the people’s liberties.343Burton’s Diary, iii. 32; Add. 22919, f. 78. This proved to be merely the first in a series of attempts by the republicans to slow – and, ideally, frustrate – the bill’s progress through the Commons. Lambert himself moved repeatedly that the bill be referred to a committee – where the republicans felt more confident of tying it up – and supported measures for adjourning debate on the bill.344Burton’s Diary, iii. 32, 191, 192, 198-9, 284, 324; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 455. Another republican ploy for impeding debate on the bill was to call instead for the reading of petitions – some of which were clearly presented at the commonwealthsmen’s behest (Lambert himself was reportedly agitating for an army petition in February, demanding the appointment of a commander-in-chief distinct from the protector).345Henry Cromwell Corresp. 456; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 21; Davies, Restoration, 58-9. Lambert played along with this tactic – notably, on 9 February, when he turned a simple request for receiving a petition into ‘a long speech’.346Burton’s Diary, iii. 154, 292-3. That same day (9 February), he made another long, filibustering speech in which he offered ‘some observations on the narratives that have been given you of transactions in these 14 years’.347Burton’s Diary, iii. 185. After examining the proposition that all governments derive from God – citing examples ranging from Nebuchadnezzar through to the Romans – he embarked on a lengthy and repetitious analysis of the causes of, and interests involved in, the first civil war.348Burton’s Diary, iii. 185-91. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this speech is his professed admiration for the old House of Lords as a constitutional counter-balance to the king.349Burton’s Diary, iii. 189-90. But the speech’s contents are less important than its value in highlighting his close working relationship with the republican leadership.

On those occasions when Lambert spoke to the Bill of Recognition itself or to the issue of settlement generally, he took a strongly republican line. On 17 and 18 February 1659 and again on 5 March, he argued that the negative voice should be vested solely in the Commons and expressed a fear of ‘the swelling of the power of the single person’ in relation to the rights and liberties of the people, ‘and most of all the privileges of Parliament, at least of this House’.350Burton’s Diary, iii. 323, 333-4; iv. 28. He referred to the new lords of the Cromwellian Other House as mere dependents of the protector, and he was a minority teller with Lord Fairfax (Sir Thomas Fairfax) in support of transacting with them only after they had been approved by the Commons (28 March).351Burton’s Diary, iii. 333; CJ vii. 621a. Colonel John Birch evidently had Lambert in mind on 7 March when he declared himself amazed ‘to hear those gentlemen that pleaded for this Instrument of Government, plead now, as such great patriots, for the liberties of the people of England’.352Burton’s Diary, iv. 61. Lambert certainly took Birch’s words as a personal affront and ‘moved to vindicate himself’.353Burton’s Diary, iv. 63. ‘I was always for the liberties of the people’, he declared – glossing over the fact that he had not hitherto proclaimed the Commons as their most reliable champion. He employed the language of the commonwealthsmen again a few weeks later in urging the withdrawal of the Scottish and Irish Members. The republicans saw these Members as Cromwellian placemen, whose right to sit in the Commons was grounded solely upon the will of the protector. To allow the single person to determine the distribution of seats, Lambert insisted (18 March), ‘utterly overthrows the privileges of this House ... it is the undoubted right of this nation, that none sit here as Members, but those that are called in according to the laws of this Commonwealth and by the consent of this House’.354Burton’s Diary, iv. 175-6. He was a minority teller with Vane on 18 March in favour of the Scottish Members withdrawing; and a minority teller with Arthur Annesley on 23 March against allowing the Irish Members to continue sitting.355CJ vii. 616a, 619a. Similarly, although Lambert’s professions against the cavaliers and the Stuart interest were undoubtedly sincere, his desire for the removal of allegedly ‘malignant’ MPs, or to uphold the return of republicans such as Henry Neville* and Luke Robinson, should also be seen in the context of the commonwealthsmen’s efforts to boost the anti-protectoral vote at Westminster and to waste yet more time.356Burton’s Diary, iii. 235, 251, 303, 304; iv. 45; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 24-5.

Lambert’s co-operation with the commonwealthsmen in the House prefigured the more general coming together of the army grandees and the republican leadership in April 1659. The impetus behind this uneasy alliance was fear that the ‘good old cause’ – an imprecise label that embraced the concepts of religious toleration, the sovereignty of the Commons and the central role of the army in national affairs – was under threat from revanchist royalism at Westminster and among Richard’s civilian advisers.357Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 61-3. The army’s disenchantment with the protectorate was heightened by moves in the Commons to lower the tax burden rather than address the growing clamour among the soldiery for arrears of pay. On 15 April, the House debated whether to reword a bill for continuing the excise so as to reduce the tax – a key source of maintenance for the army – to a fixed term.358Burton’s Diary, iv. 434-7; Davies, Restoration, 70; R. Hutton, The Restoration (1985), 32, 36. Lambert spoke against any such alteration and was a minority teller the same day against recommitting the bill.359Burton’s Diary, iv. 436-7; CJ vii. 640a. The Commons threw more fuel on the fire of army indignation on 18 April, when it passed resolutions banning further meetings of the officers without permission from the protector and Parliament and that no officer should retain his command unless he would engage not to interrupt the free meeting of Parliament. Lambert was particularly incensed at the first resolution. ‘Disperse your friends [i.e. the officers]!’, he exclaimed, while the cavaliers went unmolested: ‘this is a pitiful point’.360Burton’s Diary, iv. 457-8. The pro-Cromwellian majority in the Commons sealed its own fate and that of the protectorate on 21 April by showing a strong inclination to place the nation’s armed forces under the joint control of the protector and Parliament. To Lambert, the notion of vesting supreme command in the protector (for Parliament he deemed but ‘a fluid body that is gone [i.e. transient]’) called into question ‘whether we shall be Englishmen or not Englishmen ... Turn not away, thus, the precious prerogatives of the people’.361Burton’s Diary, iv. 473-4. The next day (22 April), the army forced Richard to dissolve Parliament.

Lambert and the restored Rump, 1659

In the days immediately following the demise of Richard’s Parliament in April 1659, Lambert was restored to the command of his old horse regiment and readmitted to the general council of the army.362Clarke Pprs. iii. 195, 196. His old rival Fleetwood was now commander-in-chief, but on his return to the army, Lambert resumed his role as its politician-in-chief – leading its deliberations with the Commonwealthsmen, conveying its resolutions to the Speaker and supervising the return of MPs to the House.363CJ vii. 644a-b, 645b; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 74, 76; Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 343, 345; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 537-8, 540-1. It is likely that he saw no alternative to recalling the Rump – pressure from the junior officers and the commonwealthsmen on this point was too strong to resist.364Baker, Chronicle, 642; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 66-70; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 537. Nevertheless, he was almost certainly the guiding spirit behind the council’s proposal for a ‘select senate’, to which senior officers would be named, as a means of ‘institutionalising the army interest’ and providing a bulwark against its parliamentary enemies.365Clarke Pprs. iii. 215; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 74-6; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 72; Farr, Lambert, 190. As a member of the steering committee of army grandees and commonwealthsmen set up on 5 May ‘to agree upon a model’ of government, he would have had further opportunity to raise the issue of where sovereignty should be vested in the revived republic.366Clarke Pprs. iv. 8.

The exact nature of the ‘Commonwealth constitution’ was still undecided when the Rump was formally restored on 7 May 1659.367CJ vii. 644a-b; Clarke Pprs. iv. 8-9. One of the restored Rump’s first acts was to establish a ‘committee of safety’, to which Lambert was added on 9 May, as an interim executive.368CJ vii. 646b; Clarke Pprs. iv. 9. This committee drew up legislation for a new council of state, to which Lambert was also named.369CJ vii. 652b. Ludlowe’s assertion that the officers on the council seldom attended its meetings is certainly not true in the case of Lambert.370Ludlow, Mems. ii. 84. He figured prominently in the council’s proceedings and was particularly influential, it seems, in its handling of military affairs and relations with the Dutch republic, Sweden and other continental states. He also made regular reports from – and may well have chaired – the ‘committee of delinquents’ that the council set up in July to process petitions from former royalists anxious to make their peace with the Rump.371Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Bodl. Rawl. C.179, passim.

Yet although Lambert would emerge as one of the restored Rump’s foremost politicians, he evidently did not regard the House as a solid constitutional foundation on which to build, and he was by no means alone.372Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 602-3, 623. On 13 May 1659, he presented a petition from the officers to the Rump, requesting inter alia the appointment of a select senate, ‘co-ordinate in power’ with the House, comprised of ‘able and faithful persons, eminent for godliness and such as continue adhering to this cause’. MPs would brook no rival to the ‘people’s representative’, however, and the officers’ petition was referred to a committee and then quietly laid aside.373CJ vii. 651a-b; OPH xxi. 400-5; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 71-2; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 566-9. Likewise, the Rump effectively refused the officers’ demand for confirming Fleetwood as commander-in-chief by vesting the selection and promotion of officers in a committee that included leading commonswealthmen (Vane and Hesilrige) as well as Fleetwood, Lambert and other officers.374CJ vii. 649a, 651a; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 382; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 99. To drive home the message, the House ordered that every officer must receive his commission from the Speaker in person. This was ‘greatly disliked’ by Lambert and his colleagues and opposed by Vane and other commonwealthsmen as tactless and divisive.375Ludlow, Mems. ii. 88, 89; Davies, Restoration, 106. But Hesilrige and his allies were ‘reverting to their old desire to control the military’.376Hutton, The Restoration, 50.

Fleetwood’s and Disbrowe’s resentment that summer at ‘the Lord Lambert’s growing greatness’ was matched by increasing tension between the Rump and senior army officers. Ill-feeling and rivalry among the restored Rump’s grandees threatened to divide Lambert from his closest ally among the republican leadership, Sir Henry Vane – Lambert’s alleged bête noir after the fall of the Rump in 1653.377Clarke Pprs. v. 296, 297; Mayers, 1659, 120. Vane now shared Lambert’s desire for a perpetual select senate co-ordinate in power with Parliament.378Infra, ‘Sir Henry Vane II’; Guizot, Hist. of Richard Cromwell, i. 426; Farr, Lambert, 190-1. Yet in June, he reportedly taunted Lambert with responsibility for the Instrument and the major-generals, and in July it was said that ‘some words passed betwixt Vane and Lambert to neither of their contentments’.379CCSP iv. 239, 278. Lambert’s dissatisfaction with the Rump deepened further over what he saw as the inadequacy of its Act of Indemnity. In July, he complained bitterly to Hesilrige and Ludlowe that the act left the soldiers vulnerable to prosecution. ‘You are’, replied Hesilrige, ‘only at the mercy of the Parliament, who are your good friends’. To which Lambert retorted, ominously, ‘I know not why they should not be at our mercy as well as we at theirs’.380Ludlow, Mems. ii. 100.

Despite their growing fear and suspicion of Lambert, the Rump’s leaders had little hesitation appointing him commander of the forces to suppress Sir George Boothe’s* royalist-Presbyterian uprising in the summer of 1659.381CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 72; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 111-12; Farr, Lambert, 192. ‘There were many officers who they had much rather trust than Lambert’, claimed Hyde, ‘but there were none they thought could do their business so well’.382Clarendon, Hist. v. 120. Lambert’s ‘too easy victory’ over Boothe’s small and inexperienced army near Chester on 19 August, far from easing tensions between officers and Rumpers, aggravated the situation even further.383Ludlow, Mems. ii. 113-14; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 109. Whereas Lambert was inclined to see his victory as a providential sign that the Rump should redouble its efforts ‘for perfecting His great work in the world’, his enemies at Westminster were more than ever convinced of his ‘Ceasarian spirit’.384Farr, Lambert, 193.

Lambert’s ‘courage and conduct’ in suppressing Boothe’s rebellion were thought by some to merit Fleetwood’s place as commander-in-chief – which may partly explain why it was Fleetwood who, on 23 August, moved the House that Lambert should be promoted from the brigade rank of major-general to major-general of the entire army (i.e. second in command under himself). Hesilrige, however, ‘prevailed with Parliament to declare that they would not create any more general officers than those that were so already’.385TSP vii. 704; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 114; CCSP iv. 239; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 109; Farr, Lambert, 196. According to Ludlowe, this was the final straw for Lambert. He and his allies among the officer corps were now ‘implacable enemies to the Parliament’.386Ludlow, Mems. ii. 115; Mayers, 1659, 235-6. For their part, Hesilrige, Vane and Fleetwood were reportedly ‘jealous [of his ambition] because he courts the soldiers, as though he would make himself chief magistrate’.387CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 188, 234-5, 246-8; Baillie Lttrs. And Jnls. iii. 437. On their march back from the north-west, Lambert’s army drew up a petition at Derby, expressing frustration at the Rump’s failure to redress the army’s grievances since its restoration in May. The petitioners demanded, among other things, the rooting out of ‘entrusted persons’ who had betrayed the commonwealth, and Lambert’s promotion as Fleetwood’s second in command.388Baker, Chronicle, 655-6; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 118; Wariston Diary, 137; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 112-13; Mayers, 1659, 237; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 606. Not surprisingly, there were many at Westminster who believed that Lambert was behind the Derby petition, although the evidence suggests that he did no more than endorse its contents.389A True Relation of the State of the Case between ... Parliament and the Officers (1659), 8-9 (E.1000.12); HMC Leyborne-Popham, 123; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 135; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 113; Hutton, Restoration, 64; Farr, Lambert, 195; Mayers, 1659, 238; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 607-8. When the petition was presented to the House on 22 September, Hesilrige led a clamour to commit Lambert to the Tower for high treason in endeavouring to raise a party against Parliament.390Ludlow, Mems. ii. 124, 134-5; Whitelocke, Diary, 531-2; Wariston Diary, 137-8; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 113; Farr, Lambert, 195. Vane and Fleetwood believed him innocent, however, and in the end the House contented itself with condemning the petition as ‘dangerous to the commonwealth’.391CJ vii. 785a-b; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 135; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 113.

On 5 October 1659, the council of officers presented a petition to Parliament essentially reiterating the army’s demands of 13 May and vindicating the Derby petitioners.392True Narrative, 4-8; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 114-15. The Rump tried initially to appease the army. But then on 11 October came the revelation that Lambert, Disbrowe, Berry, Kelsey and five other officers had been canvassing signatures to the 5 October petition from army units throughout the three commonwealths – ‘an exercise in blatant military pressure’.393True Narrative, 13-14; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 136-7; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 115; Hutton, Restoration, 65. On 12 October, Hesilrige, Thomas Scot I and Valentine Wauton – emboldened by a secret offer of support from Monck in Scotland – led the Commons in voting to cashier the nine officers and vest supreme command in seven commissioners, among them Hesilrige and Monck.394CJ vii. 796a; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii.116. This was an open challenge to the disaffected officers and was taken as such. That evening, Lambert called out the regiments loyal to him – the majority, as it transpired – and surrounded the forces that Hesilrige and his allies had hastily deployed to defend Westminster.395A Declaration of the Proceedings of the Parliament and Army (17 Oct. 1659), 4-5 (E1000.14); Ludlow, Mems. ii. 137. A tense stand-off ensued, although Lambert was able to secure the defection of Parliament’s life-guard simply by confronting its commanding officer.396Declaration of the Proceedings of the Parliament and Army, 6; Clarke Pprs. iv. 62; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 138-9; Whitelocke, Diary, 535; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 116; Farr, Lambert, 197. It was a characteristic display of courage and flair on his part, but the unwillingness of the soldiers to fight for Hesilrige’s party, or against Lambert, meant that there was never much chance of bloodshed. The ‘siege’ ended on 13 October, when the council of state ordered all soldiers to withdraw to quarters. The troops loyal to Hesilrige and his allies obeyed this command, but Lambert and Fleetwood effectively ignored it and their troops promptly took possession of the Parliament-House.397A True Relation of the State of the Case, 3 [5]; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 117; Mayers, 1659, 250-1. Once again the Rump had been turned out of doors.

The committee of safety, 1659

For the second time in his career – the first being in December 1653 – Lambert had instigated a coup against Parliament. Both Lambert and Fleetwood subsequently claimed that the ‘resolution to give disturbance to the Parliament’ was a spur of the moment reaction – Lambert protesting that he had ‘no intention to interrupt the Parliament till the time that he did it and that he was necessitated to that extremity for his own preservation, saying, that Sir Arthur Hesilrige was so enraged against him, that he would be satisfied with nothing but his [Lambert’s] blood’.398Clarke Pprs. iv. 71; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 143. Certainly the senior officers’ uncertainty over how to proceed in the immediate aftermath of the October coup does not suggest a great deal of pre-planning on their part. On 15 October, the council of officers appointed a ten-man committee that included Fleetwood, Lambert and Vane to consider ‘fit ways and means to carry on the affairs and government of the commonwealth’.399True Narrative, 21; Wariston Diary, 146; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 119. Vane had acquiesced in the October coup partly because he shared Lambert’s conviction that the best interests of the army and the sects lay in the creation of a select senate co-ordinate in power with Parliament – probably something very close to the blueprint for constitutional settlement that Vane’s friend Henry Stubbe published that October, A Letter to an Officer of the Army Concerning a Select Senate.400H. Stubbe, A Letter to an Officer of the Army Concerning a Select Senate (1659, E.1000.8); Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 126-8. By 22 October, the committee of ten and the council of officers had agreed on an interim government under a new executive, the ‘committee of safety’, to which Lambert, Vane and 21 others were appointed on 26 October.401Wariston Diary, 147-8; True Narrative, 41. Vane and his republican allies disputed the committee’s composition, however, putting further strain on the unstable alliance between Lambert and Vane that formed the keystone of the new regime.402Ludlow, Mems. ii. 143-4; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 131-2.

The fall of the Rump established Lambert, briefly, as the pre-eminent figure in English national life. Fleetwood remained commander-in-chief, but Lambert’s unique combination of military reputation and political dexterity left few observers in any doubt who now steered the ship of state.403Supra, ‘Charles Fleetwood’; Clarke Pprs. iv. 63; CSP Ven. 1659-61, p. 96; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 119-20; Hutton, Restoration, 72; Farr, Lambert, 198, 202-3. Thus it was Lambert rather than Fleetwood who dominated the council of officers’ proceedings in the weeks following the October coup.404Clarke Pprs. iv. 68; Farr, Lambert, 202. However, in putting himself at the head of army dissatisfaction at the Rump’s failure to settle the government, widen the scope of toleration and redress the soldiers’ grievances over pay and indemnity, Lambert had reduced his political constituency to a dangerously narrow section of the people. Perhaps the only civilian group he could rely on with any confidence was the Quakers.405Hutton, Restoration, 75; Farr, Lambert, 208-9. Many other sectarians distrusted Lambert’s ‘Caesarian’ ambitions.406Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 139-40. Even the army was far from his to command. Colonels Alured, Okey, Sanders and several other republican officers denounced their colleagues’ proceedings.407True Narrative, 55-62. More ominously, General Monck and his officers in Scotland had declared for the expelled Rump.408True Narrative, 24-5, 28-31. At the very moment of his pre-eminence therefore, Lambert faced ruin, for even if Monck did nothing more than mount a show of force, the parlous state of national finances and the general unpopularity of the regime at Whitehall (swelled by a flood of hostile propaganda) would likely do the rest.409Clarke Pprs. iv. 92, 112, 165, 166-7, 186-7, 219-20; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 143-6; Hutton, Restoration, 76-8.

On 29 October 1659, the committee of safety appointed Lambert to lead several regiments northwards to confront Monck.410True Narrative, 53. With hindsight, it is clear that Lambert’s only real chance of success lay in moving quickly and decisively against Monck while Fleetwood and Disbrowe resolved the constitutional wrangling in London, set a date for new parliamentary elections and ruthlessly suppressed the regime’s republican enemies – none of which happened.411H. Reece, The Army in Cromwellian Eng. 1649-60 (2013), 211-15. The army of nearly 12,000 men Lambert assembled at Newcastle in November was the largest he had ever commanded and outnumbered Monck’s by at least three to two.412Baillie Lttrs. And Jnls. iii. 439; Clarke Pprs. iv. 155; Davies, Restoration, 172; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 135. However, it would have taken all of Lambert’s skill as a general to force an engagement. Not only were his own soldiers ‘very much divided’ over whether to fight, but also Monck was determined to play for time and let his opponents’ irresolution and inertia de-stabilise the already tottering English regime.413Clarke Pprs. iv. 92, 94, 104; Farr, Lambert, 204. Moreover, Lambert was equally anxious to avoid a fight. He seems to have believed that he could convince Monck of the justness of the army’s proceedings in England.414Clarke Pprs. iv. 77-8, 102, 111, 124-5, 149, 182-3; Farr, Lambert, 203. He may even have tried to interest him in the idea of a select senate.415Wariston Diary, 158; Farr, Lambert, 208. Lambert was evidently encouraged in these overtures by the recollection of their ‘old friendship’ both as army colleagues in Scotland and as political allies against Broghill and the Resolutioners.416Infra, ‘George Monck’; Little, Broghill, 100-1, 107, 109, 133. Lambert was genuinely pained at the prospect of ‘honest’ English army men coming to blows and hoped to trade upon their former intimacy to secure an accommodation. On both counts he let sentiment cloud his military judgement.

The committee of safety was so manifestly bankrupt of authority by mid-December 1659 that Hesilrige and his friends were able to suborn the fleet and much of the army in southern England.417Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 150-5. Following the restoration of the Rump late in December, Lord Fairfax, working in concert with Monck, raised forces in Yorkshire against Lambert and seized York for Parliament.418A. Woolrych, ‘Yorkshire and the Restoration’, Yorks. Arch. Jnl. xxxix. 491-8. Hoping to retrieve the situation in London, Lambert decided to march his army southwards, but his unpaid and demoralised troops deserted en masse.419CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 288; Prose Works of Milton ed. Ayers, vii. 159; Hutton, Restoration, 83; Farr, Lambert, 206. By the time he reached Northallerton, in Yorkshire, early in January 1660, he had a mere 50 horse.420CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 294. ‘Lambert, of a man, is now become a mouse’, wrote one of Hyde’s correspondents, ‘and ... forsaken by all his army, submits to the Rump ... I do not believe he hath an hundred pound [sic] a year, all his [rents] being paid’.421Bodl. Clarendon 68, f. 104.

Defeat and death

Having lost both his army and London by January 1660, Lambert was at the mercy of enemies at Westminster. On 9 January, the Rump ordered him to repair to his house at the furthest distance from London.422CJ vii. 806b, 812b. This was an order he was ‘put to some strait to interpret’, asking

if, by my furthest house, that at Calton be intended? If so, it is altogether uncaple [sic] of harbouring of me, being quite pulled down and ruinated in the late wars. If it be meant Wimbledon or Nonsuch, it is all the favour I expect, and ... if I may [retire to either] I shall speedily do it. If not ... I should take it as a great kindness that any of you would procure me a pass to go beyond seas.423Add. 21426, f. 185.

On 26 January, the Rump gave him liberty to reside at Baynes’s house at Holdenby.424CJ vii. 823b. But then early in February, it ordered him to attend the council of state, having received information that he was trying to foment rebellion in London.425CJ vii. 837a, 841b. According to one of Hyde’s correspondents, Lambert had been ‘at work with the sectaries. Even in this low ebb he will not incline to the king’.426CCSP iv. 524-5. Summoned before the council again early in March to give security for his peaceable demeanour, he demanded to know for what fault he was being arraigned, declaring that ‘though there have been among ourselves differences of judgement, ways and forms; yet, as to the main point ... he could not be taxed in the least kind’.427CJ vii. 857b, 864a-b. The council of state set his bail at the impossible sum of £20,000, and when he declared his inability to pay it, and persisted in ‘justifying his own innocency’, sent him to the Tower.428CJ vii. 864b; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 381. It was from his prison cell that he stood as a candidate for the Yorkshire borough of Ripon in the elections to the 1660 Convention. The result was a double return that the House resolved in favour of his rivals.429HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Ripon’.

In a last desperate bid to revive the good old cause, Lambert made an audacious escape from the Tower on 10 April 1660 and tried to rally his supporters in the army at Edgehill. However, when government forces under Colonel Richard Ingoldsby* caught up with him near Daventry on 24 April he had assembled only about 300 troops. It was reported that some of Lambert’s men wanted to charge their opponents, but Lambert stopped them and instead tried to persuade Ingoldsby to join him in restoring Richard Cromwell.430Ludlow, Mems. ii. 259-60; Whitelocke, Mems. iv. 407-8. Ingoldsby refused to negotiate, however, and Lambert’s small force was dispersed. It was Lambert’s flamboyance that proved his final undoing. The splendid Arab horse he was mounted on floundered in the mud of a ploughed field, and Ingoldsby simply rode up and took him prisoner. Lambert was taken back to London, through jeering crowds, and returned to the Tower.431Hutton, Restoration, 116; Farr, Lambert, 213.

Lambert had good reason to fear for his estate and liberty at the Restoration, but not his life. He was, after all, no regicide – a point he made clear in a petition to Charles II of about May 1660.432SP29/1/84, f. 160. He acknowledged his involvement in ‘later transactions’ prejudicial to a restoration of monarchy – by which he probably meant events since the fall of the protectorate. However, he declared himself

fully satisfied that an extraordinary and good hand of God in mercy to these nations hath restored your Majesty to the peaceable possession of your right. And being perfectly resolved to spend the remainder of his life in loyalty and obedience to your Majesty

he begged for pardon. Unconvinced by such protestations of loyalty, the House of Lords in the Convention sought to except Lambert and Vane from the Act of Oblivion.433LJ xi. 114a, 129b; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 175. The Commons was more inclined to show mercy, and in the end the two Houses excepted both men but petitioned the king that if they were attainted the death penalty might be remitted – to which the king agreed.434LJ xi. 136b, 143b, 156b, 163a; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 207.

The Cavalier Parliament, more vengeful than its predecessor, decreed that as Lambert and Vane had been excepted from the act they should be proceeded against according to law. Accordingly, both men were tried for high treason in June 1662. The charges against Lambert related mainly to the spring and summer of 1659. There was no mention of his exploits in the 1640s or of the Daventry rising. In contrast to Vane, who ‘highly owned the authority of Parliament’, Lambert ‘did not speak to deny his deeds, but tried all the time to make them appear less serious and appealed to the king’s mercy’.435The Jnl. of William Schellinks’ Travels in Eng. 1661-3 ed. M. Exwood, H. L. Lehmann (Cam. Soc. ser. 5, i), 92-3; Ludlow, Voyce, 311; Farr, Lambert, 217-18. Ludlowe claimed that while Vane ‘pleaded for the life of his country and the liberties thereof’, Lambert pleaded ‘for his own’.436Ludlow, Voyce, 311. Both Lambert and Vane were convicted of high treason and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. But the king commuted Vane’s sentence to beheading and Lambert’s to imprisonment.437Farr, Lambert, 218-19.

Lambert spent the remainder of his life incarcerated first on Guernsey and then on St Nicholas Island in Plymouth Sound. He was allowed the company of his wife and three of their ten children and seems to have filled most of his days gardening.438CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 276, 574; Farr, Lambert, 220. In 1662, the king granted his estate – shorn of its former crown and church lands and forfeited property – to Lord Belasyse to hold in trust for Lambert’s wife and children; and it was principally upon Belasyse, Sir Thomas Ingram and John Rushworth* (Lambert’s attorney during the 1650s) whom he relied to help manage his personal affairs.439CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 478; 1662-3, pp. 30, 41; Farr, Lambert, 74, 156, 158-9, 164, 224-5. The many reports that circulated during the 1660s and 1670s that he was implicated in plots against the crown are apparently groundless.440Belvoir, Original letters, The Protectorate House of Lords, QZ.7, f. 32; Farr, Lambert, 220, 221, 222, 224. He died in the spring of 1684 and was buried at St Andrew’s, Plymouth on 28 March.441Morkill, Kirkby Malhamdale, 158. The manner of his death was somewhat out of keeping with his dashing public career.

He always loved gardening and took a delight, during his confinement, to work in a little one he had there [on St Nicholas island]. One day, as he was at work, some gentlemen came in a boat to see the island, and the major-general went in to change his night gown, that he might wait upon the company in a more decent dress, and catched a cold that brought him to his grave.442HMC Leyborne-Popham, 263.

Assessment

Lambert was the only parliamentarian officer of note who did not suffer from the ‘ideological limitation’ common to most of the king’s opponents, ‘that ultimate authority must rest in a Parliament’.443Hutton, Restoration, 14. Preserving the army, not Parliament, was at the heart of his political actions. His experiences after the first civil war convinced him that civilians could not be trusted to uphold the fundamentals of the good old cause.444Farr, Lambert, 228-9. The contradictory impulses towards the rule of the saints and more traditional forms of government that hampered Cromwell’s search for settlement during the 1650s were not felt by Lambert. The major-generals experiment, of which he was the architect, suggest that by 1655 he would have preferred power to reside largely with the protector and a cadre of military prefects. Four years later, he was thinking more along the lines of a military-dominated senate. But few of his fellow officers or civilian allies considered it right or practical for the army to exercise power even in the short term. The officers’ reverence for Parliaments stunted the emergence of that praetorian spirit necessary to make good their interest. Lambert went further down the path towards a revolutionary military dictatorship than any of his colleagues, and consequently by the end of 1659 he was distrusted by virtually all sections of the political nation. That his public career ended with him ‘stuck fast in the mire’, deserted by his soldiers, was suitably symbolic. His greatest, perhaps only, political legacy was the Restoration – a point made in 1661 in mitigation of his perceived offences.

This is he whose interest and faction so divided the army that all endeavours of uniting them came to nothing. This is he who by erecting an arbitrary committee of safety, a name so much a stranger to the people of England ... awakened the most indifferent, nay, very enemies of our ancient government, to bethink themselves how they might shake off this yoke and return to obedience and the protection of the laws. This is he who by marching so far northward gave opportunity to the king and kingdom’s friends to lay the foundation of that settlement which was soon afterwards so gloriously accomplished. In a word, this is he without whose unjust ambition we probably could never have obtained our just desires.445The Case of Colonel John Lambert, 6-7.